HUMANITIES IN MEDICINE

A MOUTHFUL OF HUMMINGBIRDS

BY ELAINE GUREGIAN

The patients of William Carlos Williams, M.D. (18831963) may not have known that he had another profession besides the family practice he sustained for 40 years in Rutherford, New Jersey. But it seems that Williams didn’t view writing poetry and healing people as an either/ or proposition.

And that’s something that the top winners of NEOMED’s 40th annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition found tremendously validating.

“In med school we think there can be only one path and if you have any other interest, it can detract. This competition reminds me that there are programs like NEOMED that incorporate things like poetry and that it’s ok to have a creative outlet,” said first-place winner Thomas Nguyen at this year’s award ceremony, held in person at NEOMED for the first time since 2019. In his winning poem, “Here, the light is always fading,” Nguyen memorialized his grandmother’s last days, writing, “I remember your voice, a mouthful of hummingbirds, their beaks pointed skyward.”

Being brought to campus for the annual poetry event gave three top winners a chance to spend time with likeminded students and faculty. Seeing a home for topics like narrative writing in the NEOMED curriculum, “I’m in awe of all the programming,” said third-place winner Anneka Johnston, a third-year student at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine. MORE A NECESSITY THAN A HOBBY

“All three of us write poetry to make sense of the wild and crazy things we experience as medical students. To me, poetry is more a necessity than a hobby,” said second-place winner Amelia Khoo, who — like Nguyen — is a third-year medical student at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. “Coming from a poetry mindset makes me more attentive to details that make me a better physician, too.”

GRAPHIC MEDICINE

Keynote speaker M.K. Czerwiec, a pioneer in the field of graphic medicine, told the students in the audience that she discovered while serving as a nurse in an HIV/AIDS unit in Chicago in the 1980s that making comics could help her process her feelings. When she was overwhelmed by the seriousness of the issues she helped patients cope with — and later, when she faced her mother’s cancer — she discovered solace in the pages of a notebook. Filling each piece of paper with simple drawings and captions gave her a place to unload each day’s heavy emotions — and make room for more.

Following are the three prize-winning poems from the 2022 competition. As always, the winning poems will be published in the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Listen to the winners read their poems and read co-founder Martin Kohn, Ph.D.’s reminiscence about how the contest began, both at neomed.edu/extras.

PLACE WINNER:1ST

Thomas Nguyen is a third-year medical student at Texas A&M University College of Medicine. He studied neuroscience and poetry during his undergraduate years at University of Texas-Austin and graduated with an M.S. in narrative medicine from Columbia University. He is fascinated with the connection between healing and writing and hopes to combine the two as a physician-writer. His first collection of poetry, Permutations of a Self, won the 2019 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in April 2020 by Texas A&M University Press. Other poems of his have been featured in Frontier Poetry, Nashville Review, Tinderbox Poetry, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other journals.

Nguyen’s poem is a reflection on the final days of his grandmother’s life; how memory and grief change over time.

Here, the light is always fading

& the dead speak to us in flutters. In the lull of our routines: mound of unwashed pots, damp laundry line between magnolias. When we crowded around my grandmother lying in the hospital bed, her face was chiseled alabaster, windless lake. By that time, her lungs had turned to mycelium, her liver cracked asphalt. Nodules bloomed like violet mouths. I knew enough at twelve to know this story would end with cathedrals of smoke, light through a veil. The nurse asked for her name: bà ngoại, we said. Bà ngoại, she’d say, gently, while combing my grandmother’s hair, clipping her nails. I watched my grandmother, who knew no English & writhed underneath hospital sheets whenever doctors & nurses entered, fall into repose. Tenseless, like the sun nestling within a distant field. Brief sanctum from tangled wires & the incessant whir of machines. There’s not much I remember after that. Or maybe, there’s not much left. Cartographer of my grief drawing whirlpools in the map I’ll later use to retrace this time. I know now that memory takes more than it gives. But I remember the noise foaming at the edges of your mouth like a wash. & I remember your voice, a mouthful of hummingbirds, their beaks pointed skyward.

2ND PLACE WINNER:

Amelia Khoo is a third-year medical student in the EnMed program at Texas A&M College of Medicine. She was born and raised in Alameda, California, where she cultivated a love for creative writing, and attended Brown University for undergraduate studies. There, she received her B.S. in biomedical engineering, helped edit and contribute to literary magazines, and took as many poetry classes as possible! She now lives in Houston, Texas and is pursuing her M.D. and Master’s in Engineering. Outside of poetry, Amelia enjoys singing and ultimate frisbee!

Just prior to the start of medical school, Khoo was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and found herself a patient as she underwent treatment. Her poem is a reflection on the role reversal she experienced when beginning rotations in the hospital.

bright

welled up with tears the first time I saw it (a liver) all smooth jewel in sterile brightness surprised I think by its proximity by how peaceful she looked: grip slackened eyes shut could have been sleeping although by now I know I must have been as mute silent prayer frozen on my lips whisked off into reliably dreamless sleep someone else’s bread and butter

these days I look into the patient’s mirror and a starched-coat reflection stares right back wide-eyed and unfamiliar and green mouth full of words I cannot understand unless through my own greasy-haired reflection adorned in hospital gown

consider: the only time the inside of a body is not pitch black is when it is in need of repair or being repaired and I have never known my insides to be so bright. run my fingers across the hypertrophic spots of my scar like beads on a rosary (I think a medical student closed me up but somehow I don’t mind as much anymore)

3RD PLACE WINNER:

Anneka Johnston grew up in West Michigan and attended Kenyon College, majoring in English with a special certification in creative writing, and minoring in chemistry. Continuing her lifelong commitment to avoid sunny weather, Johnston moved to Chicago following graduation, and worked in a Suboxone clinic at the height of Chicago’s opioid epidemic. She began searching for the common ground between medicine and the humanities, and became passionate about giving voice to patient experiences through narrative art. She is currently a third-year student at Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine and is planning to pursue a career in psychiatry.

Johnston’s poem is an exploration of how caretakers struggle to make meaning out of death.

CNA Clinicals Day #3

It was mud.

All mud. His language lost in pain and loose teeth, and it may have been important, may have been a plea

for a priest, a cigar, or forgiveness for stealing his sister’s lunchbox, his brother’s wife, and do you think we fill in other people’s cracks to heal our own?

Some days, I drag soap over broken bodies to convince myself that I am clean.

My instructor never turns their groans into stories.

She pokes a straw through his chapped lips to shut him up, and has me hold his wrist to feel how blood leaves the extremities when the heart begins to scream, feel how

his pulse shakes like a wet, caged bird.

He jolts.

He’ll squirm less when he’s dead my instructor jokes, and laughs when my hands jump to cover his ears betraying my need to protect this patient

from her sharp truth, her rough decree that to the world, he is already unhearing unseeing, unformed, already dispersed

beyond our reach, beyond revision the way fire burns wood into ash the way that ash and water will forever be mud.