THE PATIENT WHO CHANGED MY LIFE A Wising Up Web Anthology
PART I: RESONANCE PART II: BOUNDARIES
By the title of the
first section, Resonance,
we don't mean identifying with another, rather holding gently and
mysteriously
in imagination someone who is not us,
accepting the life-giving permeability of our interior world which is,
in ways
we can't understand, both uniquely our own and also one with the world
around
us. A reality that professional roles sometimes feel designed to deny.
Mary Ann
DiMola writes of her experience with a seven year old burn patient, "I
learned through Stevie how to bring genuine comfort to my patients, note
merely
by injecting morphine or providing nutrition, but by really being with my patients when often they had no
other source
of comfort." Learning to be with another also helped her be with
herself. Ann
Brady, working with a sixteen year old gunshot victim learns something a
little
different: "My breakthrough came when I realized that even if I couldn't
connect with him, couldn't make him see or be part of my brighter world
that I
had to care for him as if that would happen." This as if condition is both faithful and an act of
imagination
and we can hear it in the poems of Kathleen Kelley and Molly O'Dell,
which
graciously hold still and let us be, for a second, in evocative relation
with
the mystery of another.
The
writings in the second
section, Boundaries, more explicitly explore the dynamic intersections
of role
and psychological identification. When does our capacity to identify
with
someone in the apposite role of patient clarify and when does it
distort? How
does our choice to stay within the boundaries of role or to abridge them
affect
the quality of care we give? Patricia Barone's beautifully written
story, The
Halo Cast, is a wry and gentle exploration of how professional
identity is
developed and its sometimes incongruent relation with real life. Joan
Phillips'
poems are explicitly concerned with how identification can somersault us
over
boundaries that are contradictory to real care, while Kathleen Kelley's
memoir,
Clay, of a lesbian mother dying of breast cancer takes a more
ambiguous view,
letting us get in touch with the mysteries those boundaries contain and
why we
like to maintain them. Evelyn Sharenov's essay, Collateral Damage,
about the
impact of September 11th on patients in a mental ward lets us imagine
what it
might feel like to live in a world where the boundaries between our
inner
worlds and outer ones collapse.
