Chemo Brain
Anne Webster
Since a doctor gave me poison pills that left
my heart a swollen slug, killed off my bone marrow,
set my lungs to clamoring, I can get brain-freeze
without eating a snow cone. When I walk
my neighborhood’s knotted streets, lost drivers
stop to ask directions. After thirty years, I know
the pretzel-turns, but when they motor off, I wonder,
Did I say left when I meant right? My husband
gets that look when words change lanes
without bothering to signal. Like soap bubbles
they pop from my mouth–“bird” for “tree,” “cat” for “dog.”
Benefits and Burdens
When I retired from teaching in a suburban school district north of Detroit in June 2003, I left Michigan for my hometown of Pittsburgh with boxes of belongings, twenty-nine years of memories, and health insurance tied to my state pension. That insurance has served me well–except when it has not.
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The Center of Everything
The call came at midnight. “He died,” the voice on the other end said. No emotion.
“How are you, Alice?” I asked.
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Trapped Within My Stoma
Kimberlee Norwood
About the artist:
“I am a medical educator with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. From January to March 2014, I was hospitalized five times for ulcerative colitis. My doctor finally said, “I have to take you to surgery now, or you’ll die. In fact, I don’t know why you’re not already dead.” I was whisked off to surgery to remove my colon, and I awoke with a stoma (ileostomy).
About the artwork:
“Several months after my operation, a friend and I were playing around and took a picture of me through a red Solo cup koozie. This is the result. When I saw it, my immediate reaction was, “There I am! Trapped in my stoma.” This image captures how I felt for months following the removal of my colon.”
Visuals editor:
Justin Sanders
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Doe Eyes
Andrea Gordon
She burst into tears when I asked if she wanted to get pregnant.
Eman, a beautiful young woman from Jordan, sat in my family-practice office with her husband, Ali, and two adorable children about one and two years old. With her scarf and dark clothing covering all but her pale face and enormous sable-brown eyes, Eman looked closer to fourteen than twenty-four, and scarcely old enough to have any children.
“How can I help you?” I started.
“We wish to remove her IUD, so we can have another baby,” Ali answered.
I don’t think he expected me to address Eman directly.
If Only
Beatrice Leverett
When I first met Jason, I was a third-year medical student halfway through my psychiatry rotation, and he was a newly admitted patient halfway through a nasty comedown from crystal meth.
He sat slumped in his chair, scowling, his face hidden by a baseball cap and black hooded sweatshirt, growling responses to my interview questions.
“Why do I have to do this? I hate this crap. I’ve answered these bullshit questions a million times. I’ve been in the psych ward a million times, and it’s never done anything for me.”
Reading his records, I realized that “a million times” wasn’t such an exaggeration. At only twenty-five, he’d been admitted to most of the local psychiatric hospitals. For several years, he hadn’t been out of the hospital more than a few months at a time.
Medical School
We came to the one place I knew you dreaded.
As joyful as you sounded when you called me at work after you plucked the envelope – a big envelope this time – from our mailbox, I knew our happiness lay in the expectation that other oversized bundles would follow. For it to truly be our happiness, our dream, we would need to rejoice at this triumph, then file it away and ultimately go elsewhere.
Wake-Up Call
After my father died, I made sure I spoke with my mother every day. Dad’s death was sudden, if not entirely surprising, and there were a lot of logistical details to sort out. Mom, at 71, was living alone for the first time in her life. She wasn’t sleeping well. She was anxious. She didn’t understand all the paperwork that flooded into the house. I wasn’t surprised that she forgot things; she was overwhelmed with grief. And she’d never been good with technology; when she decided the phones in the house weren’t working and replaced them for the third time in a year, we just rolled our eyes. I brushed off suggestions from my brother that she might actually have a problem with her memory. Of course not. She’s just tired, anxious and grief-stricken.
Falling Fifth: The Neurosurgery Patient and the Anesthesiologist
based on Robert Schumann’s Third String Quartet, Movement 1
Audrey Shafer
We meet in the holding room; a paper dress covers your tattoos
At any moment, your craze of fragile vessels
could spill, fill the sea cave cradling your mind
Your wife holds your hand until it is time for us to go
I guide you as you blow through a straw
swimming across your long day of surgery
Five hours, and five more: surgeons untangle
a crevice of your brain, clamp the feeder, reassemble your skull
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Imagine
Mary Presciutti
About the artist:
Mary Presciutti lives in New York City, a single mother of three wonderful children. She is a self-taught Impressionist-style painter inspired by the works of Van Gogh and others. Most of all, she is committed to the health and welfare of patients with diseases of the nervous system; she works as a neurosurgery nurse practitioner at a major medical center in New York City.
About the artwork:
“This painting is part of a series inspired by my longing for peace and understanding as I work in the intensive-care unit caring for patients with neurological diseases, while also coping with the struggle of a relative with addiction and mental illness. Like many before me, I’ve often wondered whether it is possible to connect to something divine and abstract while living in a world of chaos and confusion. It remains a puzzle. Imagine reflects my awe at the beauty of the clouds and the open sea, which remind me of the endless