I sometimes tell my children that they have superpowers—usually when they’ve done something amazing, unique or powerful.
I’d like to think that I, too, have a superpower: I can move physical pain from a 9 to a 0, just with my thoughts.
I’ve been practicing this power—honing it—for more than twenty years now.
On June 2, 2010, I was giving a poetry reading at the faculty club at Columbia University Medical Center in New York as part of their “Literature & Medicine” series. I still have the list of poems I read that day, poems that spoke of my work as a nurse practitioner. One poem described my examination of an abused woman; another recounted the experience of a young teen, raped by her sister’s boyfriend. Other poems concerned the mysteries surrounding death as well as the joys of healing.
Somewhere halfway through the reading, I developed what is aptly called crushing chest pain.
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