Branches By Malavika Perinchery Photography – Art By Salma Yazji

Branches

By Malavika Perinchery

Have you ever seen a tree wither away?

First it drops one leaf; then another. The transformation happens slowly, but surely. If you pay attention to it, every day, you can clearly see what’s going to happen. But if you don’t, you don’t notice until all you’re left with is branches. Just branches.

It finally hit me today; what it is that I’ve been watching this week on the pediatric heme-onc inpatient unit. I’m watching young people die. I’m watching in real time as death wraps its tendrils around small, innocent souls. I wish I were exaggerating; I wish this was just a trick of prose, but no. This is what is happening. And if I think about this reality too hard, I want to alternatively scream and cry at the unfairness of it all.

I think about my patients and the patients on my floor almost constantly. I think about the pregnant silence that fills the room once we tell them about another metastasis. I think about the parents who sleep on the chairs in the hospital room while their children go in and out of consciousness. I think about the child who is too young to know why they even have to undergo chemotherapy.

When I watch a tree wither away, I wonder if anyone noticed that first leaf fall. I wonder if anyone saw what was coming. Because now, all I see are branches.

Author’s Note: I wrote this short essay while I was rotating through the pediatric hematology-oncology unit at UT Health. It was a profoundly meaningful rotation for me.

Malavika Perinchery is a student at the UT Health San Antonio Long School of Medicine, Class of 2023.

Photography – Art

By Salma Yazji

Pictured are Syrian refugee children playing on a donated slide set, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and white tents they now call home. Their stories unveil truths of missing family members and homes turned into rubble within seconds. Yet in this moment, all that we see are girls levitating off the ground as none of their feet touch the reality they are in.

I took this photo on a scorching summer day in July 2014 in the Za’atari refugee camp. At the time, Za’atari was a collection of tents in a desert bordering Jordan and Syria. It has since become the world’s largest camp for Syrian refugees fleeing the endless tragedy of war, having grown into a permanent settlement that houses almost 80,000 refugees.

This form of creative expression has been passed down along generations. My grandfather was a country-renowned photographer with a shop in the streets of Damascus, enveloped by jasmine vines. My father grew up working days and nights developing film in the studio. Having this photo recognized eight years after it was taken and 11 years into the still ongoing Syrian revolution forces me to reconnect with a conflict, I had found myself inevitably growing numb to.

Salma Yazji is a student at the UT Health San Antonio Long School of Medicine, Class of 2023.