Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Cavano Trio

I.  Fear Itself

Walking on tree trunks, pounding the wooden walkway until it shrieks, a pair of senior ladies discuss ways to improve their health, where to buy a good tomato and evening dinner plans. Behind them, walking on sticks, two men, slim with cardiac concern, worry about taxes and the hurricane season and argue about which liquid establishment makes the best dirty martini.

A bit farther back, an elderly couple turtles along helping each other, old bones groaning, take one sad step at a time while planning still another European trip and believing they will not pass from this orb with plans made and the trip not taken.

Ahead on a bench, pocket full of bottled pills, soft cervical-collared-me watches the parade of fears and denials snake through the morning on the wooden walkway. I greet them with empathic smiles and waves knowing I but see myself.

II.  James and Jude*

James and Jude, sadly gone of a sudden Sunday.
Crash. A lovely leaving as one, father and son.
Still, in this world of raging roulette we who
remain ever long for their ghosts.

Ah, but Heaven shall wipe away all tears when we
meet again, soul to soul, somewhere
somewhere out there in Rumi’s field.

III.  Bench Talk

On the bench where he had been sitting with the Live Oak late in the afternoon she took a seat. He nodded kindly. She began to talk: of the exquisite texture of the Magnolia blossom; of the Spanish Moss above their heads; of the lump in her breast, the biopsy and the waiting for the doctor’s verdict; of She-Crab Soup and her son’s close call at Virginia Tech where the mass killings had taken place; of how lovely the sun felt on her skin this day; of two marriages, now history, and her fear of another relationship.

With soft, soft eyes he answered each pain and with twinkling eyes each veneer of pleasure. She continued to speak going backwards in her memory: her first love, who loved her not; an unexpected pregnancy and how she disposed of it. To their left a Snowy Egret landed to fish at the edge of the lagoon. She pointed and commented on its white perfection. He nodded kindly. The Egret swallowed and she did likewise as she told of her daughter’s passing from a brain tumor before her twentieth year. Again he smiled kindly and knowingly. There were other things to tell and she told them, her story punctuated by the singing of birds, the wind in the trees, his smile and the ever-so-gentle nodding of his head.

When she had told it all she took a very deep breath and, for the first time, looked him straight in the eye. “It's been a long, long, hot summer”, she sighed. “Yes”, he smiled. And now, her burdens reduced at last, she thought as she left: “that man is a brilliant conversationalist.”           

Download PDF: Download Three Pieces by Frank Cavano

Author Bio:  Frank Cavano is a retired psychiatrist who writes because it is an enjoyable experience and, often, a healing one as well. His poems and other writings are often of a spiritual/inspirational/metaphysical nature. He tries to be a faithful, empathic observer of the human condition in all his efforts. Email.                                          

* James was my wife's nephew and Jude his son. They went out for ice cream on a Sunday about three years ago and were killed in an automobile accident. Imagine.

 

 

Dawn Sky

Williamstown, 10.17.12 Early Morning

Vast sky - Crowded with Clouds and Contrail

 

Nora and Ann by Renee M. Cohen

On November 6, Massachusetts voters will decide whether a physician may provide a dying patient with medication to bring about a faster, easier death if the patient chooses. On the ballot will be a Death with Dignity Act.  For more about this iniative read: May Doctors Help You Die by Marcia Angell.

Renee Marks Cohen presents us with a death story that would not be have been facilitated by this law.  It will make some uneasy and raises many questions.  We present it here to stimulate thought and discussion.

"Nora and Ann committed joint suicide; that’s what the mother, Nora, explained in the documents she left to be found in her apartment or mailed in advance. I read about the suicides in the newspaper.
     Nora was in her mid- or late 70’s; her daughter, Ann, who had cerebral palsy, was about 30. Her condition was so severe from birth that she couldn’t crawl, walk, or toilet herself. But she could feed herself from a table, use a motorized wheel chair, and master a computer to create graphics and communicate on the Internet. She could talk, but a novice listener had to concentrate intensely to understand her.

Read full essay: Download Ann and Nora

Author Bio: Renee Marks Cohen has done lifestyle writing as well as medical editing and writing. In the latter niche, she has been the managing editor of New York Medical College's New York Medical Quarterly, and the author, for Janssen Japan, of over 35 interview articles on schizophrenia. She has edited books on neurology, taught Beijing Medical University scientists how to write, and audited clinical trial case report forms. Cohen is also a zumba and yoga enthusiast. You may reach her at: RMC Email.

 

The Sweater by Katie O’Sullivan

 

 

I put your
sweater on
though it’s hot
as hell outside
and the street-flooding, thunder-busting
rain
did little
to relieve.

People  like me,
medicated with blood thinners,
run contrary to the thermostat,
especially when the AC  is belting away,
fogging  windows.

Pulling your sweater off the hanger
made me smile, not sad,
because it always amused you
that I wore it more often than you.

We bought it together.
I remembered a shop in London.
But I see from the label
that it was from right  here in Houston,
100% camel hair, camel color.
Comes  to my knees, big like you,
There's a tissue in the pocket,
probably mine, a button missing,
a moth hole in the sleeve.

I’ll put it back in the closet
with the rest of your things ,
after I turn the AC off.

Author Bio:  Katie O'Sullivan "is  late writer of poetry, essays, short stories and memoirs and one 10 minute play produced in Houston where I have  lived since  my husband's retirement. I received an AA degree from UCLA before our marriage and after our 7^th child was born I continued my education in Modern Near East History at the American University of Beirut, graduated and continued on a Master Degree program before we were transferred to the Netherlands. Living for 15 years in Lebanon was a beautiful and exciting experience and I spent much of those years as a volunteer at the American University Hospital. Between my family, studies and volunteerism, I didn't have time to write until we came to Houston."  You may contact her at K O'S email.

Heart Matters: Katherine Treadway, M.D.

Katherine Treadway teaches medical students about the patient-doctor relationship at Harvard.  She will give a free talk in Lenox, MA next week.

Heart Matters:
The Patient-Doctor Relationship
Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 6:00 p.m.
Shalespeare and Company
Founder's Theater
70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA
Sponsored by BMC

Treadway has written extensively on this topic. "I watch the second-year students file into the Ether Dome for their first day of my “Patient–Doctor 2” course. For me, this course marks their true entry into medical school. Here, they will refine their history-taking skills, building on their knowledge of pathophysiology and disease; they will learn how to perform a physical examination; and they will touch a living stranger's body as clinicians for the first time. For them, right now, these are just skills to be learned. They do not see how they will be transformed by them. They know that these newfound abilities will open the door to clinical medicine. They do not know how utterly changed they will be by crossing that threshold."  Full Article

If you wish to attend, please email Sue Kelly at BMC or call 413-447-2775 by October 9 

Dr. Treaway’s advice to students:
As you acquire more medical knowledge and responsibility, there will be times you will focus more and more on the problem and forget the patient attached to it. As you strive to take a good history, get the facts straight, perform a good physical exam, and put it all together into a comprehensive clinical picture, you will find that with all the anxiety involved in wanting to do it right, the patient becomes further and further away...
While I am busy treating the bodies of my patients, I try to remember to treat the patients as well — to touch them in small ways as well as large.