Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Miss Diagnosis

Many research studies reveal breakdowns in the diagnostic process that cause a staggering toll of harm to patients.  Here is one woman's story.

Miss Diagnosis
by Beth McKim

It is with extreme trepidation that I begin to write this. The details are painful to remember, and I am highly superstitious. It’s almost as if re-telling the events could reverse the previous results.

My saga began when I was 22 years old, working my first job as a social worker for the county welfare department…

Read full text: Download Miss Diagnosis by beth mckim-1

Miss McKim's chronicle of faulty diagnoses reminds me of a poem Gilda Radner published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1989.

Doctors are whippersnappers in ironed white coats
Who spy up your rectums and look down your throats
And press you and poke you with sterilized tools
And stab at solutions that pacify fools.
I used to revere them and do what they said
Till I learned what they learned on was already dead.

Author Bio:   Beth McKim is a writer and actress. She lives in Houston, a city that has undergone severe challenges in recent months , but remained strong and victorious. Beth is a standardized patient who works to help medical students develop empathetic interpersonal skills. Her poetry, essays, and short stories appear regularly in niche publications.

Far Side of the Styx

"Soon your life will have flown like a bird from a branch!"

"A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?"  – Yehuda Halevi

You can cry in heaven if someone kills you against your will
You can take time to mourn before visiting your loved ones
back on earth to tell them you're ok.  It takes time
to come to terms with death even on the far side of the Styx
if it is you who has been killed.  "I wouldn't have it
any other way" reserved for those whose deaths were innocent

I have a lot of company here, you say, now that I have accepted my fate
kept apart ‘til then lest the other souls start remembering. . .
and couldn't leave the clouds to comfort you myself in pain
not of the bodily kind but of the soul but now I count my blessings

too and not just the mistakes and carelessness that brought me here
no more pain and I can move freely about the earth without my power chair
I don't have to hold on for the next medication or nurture false hope

It's done.

– Martha Deed
The Last Collaboration, p. 197

See PDF:  Download Martha Deed Selected Poems

The Last Collaboration, a chaos narrative, is a re-construction of Millie Niss's life and death in a community hospital ICU. Because Millie was intubated but alert, her side of every conversation was recorded in a series of notebooks she sent home with her mother, Martha Deed. Millie's notes, emails, the daily diary she sent home, and posts to her blog are set into frames constructed from her mother's log.  The Last Collaboration is a powerful document from which we can all learn.

Illness narratives (pathographies) may be broken down into three categories:  quest, restitution, and chaos stories.  The latter is the rarest and perhaps most important since there is much to learn from our mistakes.  The two former ones can be “feel-good” narratives.  For more on these types of narratives see: “From narrative wreckage to islands of clarity,” a fine article from Canadian Family Physician.  The Last Collaboration is a true “chaos story” and a narrative we can all learn much from.