Soul Stories: Standing With Giants
Josephine Ensign
About the artist:
Josephine Ensign is a nurse and writer. She teaches health policy and health humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of the medical memoir Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net.
About the artwork:
This photograph is part of the artist’s multimedia digital humanities project Soul Stories: Voices From the Margins, about the role of narrative in health and healing in the context of trauma. The Soul Stories project includes photographs and digital storytelling videos to accompany a forthcoming book of essays and poems about her search for ways to humanize health care for patients, families, communities and providers. “I took this photograph while writing a lyric essay, ‘Foot Notes,’ which concludes with this line: ‘Feet take us to new territory; they witness and record our journey.’
Visuals Editor:
Sara Kohrt
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Matching Rings
Joy Liu
The room is stuffy, but the woman is shivering.
Her husband stands by her bedside. An interpreter that they’ve hired to stay with her day and night stands at the foot of the bed. And then there’s me, the doctor (I’m an intern), waiting to deliver one of many sad speeches I must give today.
Smiling wanly, she struggles into a sitting position and shakes my hand.
Even with a diagnosis of metastatic stomach cancer, she has movie-star looks. She’s only twenty-six–the same age as me. I can imagine her stepping out of a red-carpet premiere in Shanghai. Instead, having hired personal interpreters and taken a flight halfway across the world, here she is in this hospital bed, waiting expectantly for me to tell her what we can offer her.
Patient Belongings
Wynne Morrison
A man a few feet ahead of me
is pulling a rolling carry-on,
a clear plastic “belongings” bag tied
to the top by a white drawstring.
I can’t resist a glance in the bag,
like a stranger who wonders about lives
in the elevator or grocery line.
It holds some clothes, playing cards,
the ordinary things. And lying on its side
is a small helicopter, its unpainted
wooden slats as thin as split popsicle sticks,
a broken rotor bent awkwardly
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Withering Away on the Outside
You are an angel, undeserving of such tortuous demise.
I bit my tongue to hold back these words I was thinking but couldn’t say to our young, male patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The attending physician had just exclaimed, “Foot drop is often one of the first signs of ALS. Do you notice here the distal muscle atrophy, including the intrinsic muscles of the hand, namely the dorsal interosseus muscles and thenar eminence?”
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Halfway Home
I met Terry the day after he sat in the back of a pick-up, joyriding on a busy interstate. A big rig whooshed by, sucked Terry out of the truck bed and slammed him into the side of the semi-trailer before he fell back into the truck. One scalp laceration and a few facial scrapes presented evidence of the accident. The damage occurred inside Terry’s head.
It shames me to admit I practiced the defense mechanism of black humor. During shift change, we joked and wondered if Terry had MFB, or mush for brains. Countless days and doses of diuretics, rehydration, and more diuretics without a twitch, grimace or cough from Terry decimated my hope for his recovery. I bathed him with coarse wash cloths and repented by lavishing his skin with lotion. I talked about sports, music, even Tiger Beat magazine. I prayed for him to a god in which I didn’t quite believe.
Two Years and a Shadow
Just a shadow over two years ago, my parents’ lives shattered when old age carried deep illness into their home and broke everything into shards. Those shards will be with us forever. They will, I fear, be visited upon seven upon seven generations of sons and daughters and nurses and doctors and therapists and priests and aides and friends, seven generations to come.
The miracle is that we are still here, two years plus a shadow on from that nightmare time.
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Alloimmune
“I only have bad options for you.”
I had visited this place, this stifling humid ultrasound room, a thousand times in my fears. But now it was real, and I had a choice to make. All the grinning, stupid hope I had embraced, the idea that this was a walk of faith I could use to teach others, rose up as a dark maroon flush in my chest. Hubris. The ancient Greek kind.
Saving Private Ryan
Gregory Rutecki
The late Eighties was the worst of times in medical education–the era when doctors in training worked a virtually unlimited number of hours each week. This unceasing and inhumane workload led residents, understandably, to view patients purely as collections of physical ailments.
Back then, I was an attending physician at a community teaching hospital. One day, as usual, I was preparing to make morning rounds and, simultaneously, to do my best to teach my team of internal-medicine residents.
Fourteen patients awaited us, every one of them quite sick. As my team and I proceeded from one bedside to the next, struggling to cram the patient interviews into ever-dwindling snippets of time, I felt a familiar sense of growing pressure; it was a struggle to focus fully on each patient.
Despite this, our last patient’s chart notes grabbed my complete attention.
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How Did He Just Wake Up?
I hung up the phone in shock. I never felt so helpless.
My brother was lying in a deep coma in a Bronx hospital, and none of his nine siblings were in America. My parents were dead, and the closest relative was my mom’s brother who lived in Canada. He had already booked a flight to New York for the same night.
Sitting in a village in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a community health nurse, I cried and prayed.
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The Sign
Give, give, give–what is the point of having experience, knowledge, or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t tell them to others?… It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world, and with the divine.
–Isabel Allende
My office at the hospital is not unusual. Amid the clutter there are several special mementos and notes received from patients and families over the years. Each one holds a story, brought back to life when I touch it again.
A few years ago, the sister of a long-term patient stopped by with a framed picture. We talked about her brother and his long battle with his cancer.
He had spent his career working for the city repairing street lights and signs. While in the prime of his life, he had developed a tongue cancer. After an initially successful surgical removal followed by radiation therapy, he developed a recurrence. Over the following months, the cancer had grown and spread. Eventually, there were no more options. He found peace and prepared for the end of his life.