Today in the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Blog, Madge McKeithen writes,
I imagine a doctor and a patient facing a tough situation, a diagnosis difficult to deliver or to make. I imagine neither of them wanting to be in that conversation. What poem might each hold (figuratively or literally)? What one between them? Many come to mind — part of the beautiful multiplicity of poetry. The patient’s poem might invite her to consider herself both fully flesh and more than her illness; it might achieve its lift or transcendence with a surprise twist of humor. The one in the physician’s pocket might also invite an approach to grasping his humanity, a setting of resolve or the loosening of familiarity. And between them they might, as William Stafford writes, stumble on words, “a program of passwords. / It is to bring strangers together.” An important difficult conversation that might not have happened does.
I don’t really have words to describe the feeling in my heart when I read this. I guess I’m just happy that there’s someone out there recognizing these unwanted, heavy meetings between physician and patient, and inviting us to imagine their poems.
We are a part of this imagined meeting, my physicians and I.
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