https://arsmedica.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/11h00_team-equity.pdf
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Truthsaying: The need for honesty from patients & doctors: session # 5
With themes of truth & hope underpinning the session, it being International Men’s Day, we read texts mostly by women about pregnancy, labour, babies and girls!
We started, though, with a run through Yeats’ ‘Paudeen’. They’re getting there. We had a recap on last week, and a summary of Maeve Binchy’s ‘Anna’s Abortion’.
From that we read and analysed an extract from Emilie Pine‘s ‘From the Baby Years’ section of Notes to Self. The extract dealt with the loss of her one and only pregnancy. We discussed how particularly invested Pine was in the pregnancy (“I see that I’m shaking”) and how that comes through in her hope & wishful thinking in the face of contrary information/evidence > “Maybe I am wrong. / Maybe the date is wrong.”
We discussed how despite our ideals of professionalism and standardisation, we nonetheless often sense and operate by other, more human realities >
“I have a moment of hoping this coincidence [of going to the same university as the doctor] will make her well-disposed towards me”.
We mentioned how bizarre it is how we often act contrary to our truths, pretending because of not wanting to reveal our uncertainties or to risk appearing not in control > “I pretend like I’ve done this before”.
I emphasised how honestly Pine was recounting all of this now as the narrator. We discussed the contrast between how Pine is aware of the constraints on the staff when it comes to pronouncing the still growing foetus dead, and her actual anger >
“I am furious. At the situation and, specifically, at them. I am a woman, in grief, and these women will not look me in the eye as a fellow woman and tell me that I’m not going to be a mother.”
We discussed the possibility that shame felt by the midwives was behind their failure here. We discussed the blunt honesty of Pine’s admission of how she felt observing the pregnant women outside the National Maternity Hospital > “I would be a better mother. I deserve it more.”
I emphasised how honest a writer she is in her retrospective analysis of her actions and thoughts >
“I am so deep into this that I don’t even see the problem with comparing not being pregnant to a serious illness.” And I therefore suggested she was a welcome/useful voice to hear in the context of how complex the doctor-patient relationship can get, with two flawed “entities” contributing to it. (It is too often presented over-simplistically as rude doctor failing innocent patient.)
~
We moved on to Maggie O Farrell‘s I Am, I Am, I Am, specifically an extract from the chapter called ‘Abdomen 2003’ that recounts the birth-plan for and delivery of her child. (I used the adapted version published by Time magazine.) We discussed how incredibly rude (almost literally: not credible) the consultant, Mr C, was. I paused on and parsed the sentence: “I wish now I’d left there and then, but at the time I was so astonished I complied.” I asked whether or not O Farrell was being as retrospectively honest as Pine here. Was it just astonishment?
[I diverted for a moment to read this important passage from Pine’s last chapter:
The stinging irony, of course, was that my entire talk was about ways that women are intimidated into silence. And here I was, with a platform to speak [having just given a lecture on the silencing of women about rape], finding myself with the same difficulty. The Faculty Chair’s comment [“I find it hard to reconcile how you look and your manner with your subject matter. I mean you look … I don’t want to use the word ‘cute’ but …”] implied that I shouldn’t be talking about rape. It is more than just tedious, this women-should-be-seen-but-not-heard attitude. It is a way of telling women to back to where they belong, back to being silent. I am gobsmacked that I still encounter this attitude in the university. And I am, most of all, weary of having to come up with something in response. I should have called him on his misogyny. But in the moment that he said it, I did not even allow myself to think about the implications of his comment. I wanted to look professional. I wanted to seem strong. I wanted to move on. As so I side-stepped. Which is, of course, a kind of silence.
I suggested Pine’s analysis was possibly true for the O Farrell situation too.]
The reappearance later in the episode of Mr C as O Farrell’s “saviour” was useful in setting up the idea that sometimes the rude doctor is all we’ve got, and maybe we just have to learn as patients how to deal with it, how to communicate with them to protect ourselves.
We contrasted, as O Farrell clearly intends, Mr C with the stranger in beige scrubs who comes to her emotional rescue while “a room full of people … are frantically working to save [her] life.” > “He stepped towards me, away from his wall, and took my raised hand. He enfolded it in both of his. I gazed up at him mutely. His touch was infinitely gentle but firm and sure. He stayed with me while they stitched and stapled me together again; he took the weight of my head and shoulders as they lifted me from the operating table onto a gurney.” [Italics added.]
~
We then read & analysed a story written by a man, Yay! (albeit a Michael Longley type of man > “I’m finely attuned … to the feminine side of the men I like. I really don’t like men who are pumped full of testosterone. I like my men to have a large dose of the feminine virtues.”) ‘The Girl with a Pimply Face’ by William Carlos Williams is one of my favourite texts to discuss with medical students because at first the male doctor’s sexualised descriptions of the teenager he meets on a house visit (“She had breasts you
knew would be like small stones to the hand”) make him seem just “creepy” (as was said today). We analysed the story in considerable detail and discussed too many things to summarise here, but with similar themes as above, of honesty, truth telling, self-awareness … and the sources of hope amidst all the negativity and human failure.
The girl with acne acts like Pine & O Farrell wish, with hindsight or in the very moment, they had acted.
The Williams story is set in a poor, immigrant neighbourhood where people from socially disadvantaged situations do what they have to and can to survive. The doctor too. He (like Sassall in Berger’s A Fortunate Man) in the identifies more with them than he does his colleagues, and he sees in the teenager a sign of something that offers hope. (“She was just a child but nobody was putting anything over on her if she knew it, yet the real thing about her was the complete lack of the rotten smell of a liar.”)
~
To emphasise the socioeconomic angle of this (and of the Berger text from last week), I read the only poem of the week, Julia Donaldson’s brilliant version ofThe Magic Paintbrush (with equally brilliant and clever illustrations by Joel Stewart, which I showed them as I read):
"He slips the brush into her hand
And tells her to be sure
Never to paint for wealthy folk
But only for the poor."
I say straight up to them, emulating as best I can the girl with pimples: what if the paintbrush is your medical qualification and what if we told you only to treat poor people. That stirs things up a good bit. I tell them class is over.
‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’
The film opens with the Carlo Levi figure in a very reflective mood, surrounded by his portrait paintings of the peasants of southern Italy where he was banished by Mussolini’s government in 1935, and where he found himself forced back into medical practice to do what he could for the sick and ailing, impoverished and ignored people he encountered there. He promised them he would return but he never did.
“My dad was taken to a psychiatric unit because he had dementia and died six weeks later”
Michele McDonagh writes in the Irish Times about her father’s & her own & her siblings’ experience of his dementia.
From the words of Maggie O’Farrell in I Am, I Am, I Am, an Odgen Nash-like verse:
On the whole, they are an unflappable breed
professing a deliberately neutral creed.
It’s when this façade slips – if they hurry
or raise their voices – that you need to worry.
And it’s never a good sign when medics run.
“My job isn’t to judge him… my job is to care for him.”
This Jewish doctor looked into the eyes of the man who killed 11 people in his own synagogue.
https://www.channel4.com/news/man-accused-of-pittsburgh-synagogue-shootings-appears-in-court
From story to poem to lyric to song
To finish up, we left the writing of poems behind us, and tried writing a song together.
Started, though, with a mime: old man walking along, slips & hurts himself; finds a tree, breaks off branch & uses it as stick to walk safely across rest of room; looks behind him & sees a younger person about to walk across room, signals to her to wait, walks over & hands her the stick, which she uses to walk safely across rest of room.
Then, mimed a mime: three lines; first line, five syllables; second line, seven syllables; third line, five syllables; first line.
A haiku. Hurray! Then, sounded the following syllables, with vowel sounds only first:
‘A’ ‘E’ ‘U’ ‘A’ ‘E’
‘U’ ‘I’ ‘A’ ‘E’ ‘I’ ‘IH’ ‘E’
‘I’ ‘Y’ ‘A’ ‘E’ ‘I’
!!!!
The sounds became more and more clear and defined with consonant sounds until words were indicated and eventually the Seamus Heaney haiku emerged:
Dangerous pavements
But I face the ice this year
With my father’s stick.
We began reciting this together with more and more confidence until a hint of pitch was introduced here and there, and this eventually became the melody of the Paul Simon setting of ‘Dangerous Pavements’ which eventually everyone was singing.
The poem connected with some of our themes (relations, health) & modes of working (empathy, objects).
~
Having thus illustrated a process, we returned to a poem we’d been reciting together for a few weeks, namely: ‘Bone Flute’ by Doireann Ní Ghriofa. The group split up into twos and threes and began sifting the poem for musical prompts and setting ideas. These included ‘cawing’ sounds, breathing sounds, grunts, chanting, whistling. For lyrics, the group focussed on particular moments in the narrative of the poem, reworking the words considerably to tell a sketched version of the story. Eventually, a few melodic themes were sung out, and one member of the group being a musician began consolidating those melodic lines on the fiddle, until everything could be recorded onto GarageBand for later editing.
