The Poetry of Nursing

Poems and Commentaries of Leading Nurse-Poets

Judy Schaefer

• Editore: The Kent State University Press
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612779928
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Poetry

So much written about literature and medicine has been from the perspective of physicians. But in the last few years nurses have found their voices and are making important contributions to the field of biomedical and nursing humanities. These men and women professionals see different things and experience patients and health care issues in different contexts.

Judy Schaefer has compiled this anthology of contemporary nurse-poets' work, which is accompanied by their commentaries about their poetry, their work, and their lives. She has gathered contributions from some of the best-known nurse-poets as well as from those who deserve to be. The Poetry of Nursing will add significantly to the ever-growing body of literature that connects medicine, nursing, and the humanities.

Constance Studer

Nurses, like their patients, are often caught in the grip of suffering. Like some of the other nurses in this book, Studer writes about her own illness, attributed to a vaccine, something we expect to protect us. In the following pages, she articulates her trek, guided by the new maps of literary devices and exquisite observation. She holds nothing back. Maps become veins and arteries and healing rivers; words become salvation. She writes curiously of fellow nurses who perceived her as less serious once they learned of her writing workshops and graduate classes. She perseveres, her lives merging into a new creative being. She learns to “layer metaphors and emotions” so that she can take it all in. The ultimate destination is a place of joy rather than despair when she writes, “I have no answers, only two hands.”

DEAR DR. WILLIAMS, DEAR POET

It’s all about pace

planting palms within loamy skin

excavating stories buried deep within bone, you whisper

as I bob on the rim of the university bubble,

float past preachers and salesmen certain

they have the antidote to disease and famine.

Poem. Steady eye at the hurricane center

of flu epidemics and cancer clusters,

supplication to spare a son, a father.

Hours stolen between patients,

scribbling poems on the back of envelopes,

furtive game of test and balance.

Lay cold metal ear against shivering flesh,

listen to the swish of deficient valves

as the anxious heart gallops across open meadow.

My offering is about Carla who bled,

whom I’ve just left alone inside all those tubes

and wires that need tending,

an innocent who didn’t know that the miracle

keeping her heart dancing—pacemaker—could also be dangerous,

the reason I arrived cold, wet, late.

Pens carry steady light down into the body’s labyrinth,

part and weave incisions bloom with looped handles,

grey roses, white gardenias. Into the netherworld

grasp red muscle, yellow fat between metal teeth,

part and weave. Your voice in my ear: Never mind

the phone, that mad thing, that curse,

words demand to be born

between calming a man bronzed by leukemia,

child pregnant with child.

House still, my son warm in his bed,

words blow through leaves calling.

What medicine takes apart,

poetry breathes in whole. Knife and pen join hands,

take up the dance,

whirl and glide and spin face-to-face,

arms encircling arms as they debride scar tissue,

excise pendulous tumors,

sing lyrical songs a capella

with bell-like harmony of hemostats and knives,

wounds healed by a tiny thread of ink.

Next shift Carla’s cheeks are bright peonies

and my poem—dancing its wild flamenco

within her chest—has just earned

the only prize it will ever need.

VOICES IN THE BOOKS LINING my shelves call to me. I pick up Emerson and his words sing, The poet is the only true doctor. Freud whispers, Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. Flaubert croons, One does not choose one’s subject matter, one submits to it. And from the twentieth-century doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, who scribbled poems in scattered moments between delivering babies and shooting antibiotics into the buttocks of screaming children: It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.

The first time I saw a caduceus it was hanging on the wall of my stepfather’s office. Back in the late 1950s, Dr. Kenneth Browne was a general practitioner in a small farming community in northern Ohio. The caduceus, that most revered holy symbol, the scepter and two serpents, the emblem of life associated with physical and spiritual health. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs of our home; I often heard odd bits of conversation as it floated up from Dad Browne’s office. Need to cut out this mole. Is it cancer, Doctor? Won’t know until I do the biopsy. Wait and see. The summer before I entered nurse’s training, he sometimes let me help.

I watched as he listened with the stethoscope for wheezes or bubbles or rales. He tapped with his middle finger as he listened for an echo, a timbre that would tell whether fluid or a mass was lodged between the lung and his hand. It was from him that I learned that hands and heart can speak more clearly than words.

Nursing is monitors chugging and paying close attention to the body. Nursing is sudden death and standing at the head of the bed, bagging and saying, You’ll be okay, Mr. Bennett. You’ll feel us pressing on your chest. All he’ll remember later are lights and tunnels. Coronary care is high tech and chest pain and fear of bypass open-heart surgery and calling the attendant at midnight. Coronary care is lidocaine and sodium bicarbonate and three hundred watts of electric shock to the heart. Does the patient have a pulse? Give the epi now. Nursing is a fight for the right to provide nursing care; it is a circle of fatigue around the eyes. Nurses are the unhappy spouses in this marriage to medicine. The marriage isn’t working, but no one knows how to fix it. Patients are the latchkey children of this volatile union, the innocents who experience the inadequacy of the health-care safety net.

Just say the words intensive care nurse and images can swirl out of focus: smashed skulls, stapled backs, shaved heads, curved incisions, bandage turbans, surgical drains, crani caps. I’ve stood in the hall and felt the air being sucked out of the room as a surgeon left after telling a young wife that her husband had an inoperable brain tumor. I’ve witnessed burned skin turn pink, pain numbed, eyesight saved, walking restored. Our patients arrived with hope: ranchers from the Western Slope, a teacher from Pueblo, a butcher from Telluride, a CEO from a software firm, a homeless man. We were the ones who eased them out of their jean jackets and blazers and three-piece suits, tied up the back of their flimsy gowns.

The heart, that complicated mixture of dependency and splendid independence. To be able to listen to the human heart, to draw meaning from its slightest vibrations or whispers, to take a droplet of blood and perceive its vital balances, to convert electric markings into precise knowledge are only science to doctors. But to the patient they are powers that come from the gods.

I was working full time in Intensive Care–Coronary Care when I was accepted in the Masters of Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado. Every week at the poetry workshop, I was aware of how different my world was from that of my fellow students. Not only was I older than the other students, I was also working full time and a single parent of a young son. As I listened to students arguing about the length of a term paper, my mind was still with the family of a person we’d just saved in the unit. I was in the workshop to learn the craft of poetry, to be around other people who loved literature, to get my work critiqued, to make sense of all those images of pain and human idiosyncrasies and battling egos.

When my fellow nurses found out that I was taking writing workshops and graduate classes, a curious thing happened. Suddenly I was perceived as not being as serious about nursing as I’d been before. The thought of changing careers was the furthest thing from my mind. Since no one asked what writing meant to me, I never told them that writing is a way of life as well as a vocation, a process, a journey, more than a destination. Writing becomes a life-sustaining habit, like exercise or eating three meals a day. I wanted to tell my fellow nurses that writing and nursing go together like a long, peaceful marriage where each partner takes turns crying and consoling, arguing and reconciling. The marriage lasts because both partners know they’ve been heard, understood, and accepted in spite of all their imperfections.

I write to create an alternative universe where I can pretend that oceans are pristine, where hospitals are no longer needed. Writing is a mingling of sweet and sour, yin and yang, terror and tingle. A legal high when a sentence works or a poem tells me what it wants to say. Writing, that trancelike state where distractions disappear, anxiety is put on hold; a feeling of flow, endorphins, natural opiates; that room where I can close the door and be safe and whole. In life, like in writing a poem, one of the most difficult lessons is learning how to layer pain in metaphors and emotions so that you can take it in. Layer it like the stroke of fingers on an arm, like the stanzas in a psalm.

Writing is like nursing in many ways. You never feel as though what you have to offer is good enough. You’re never done. You have to pay close attention to details or it will die. You have to keep the faith, persevere, see it through. People are the primary ingredient in both. You must be willing to reassess at a moment’s notice and embark on another course. Sometimes radical surgery is needed in order for it to heal. Telling a story, listening to another person’s, is what sacred means.

HAWK, WINTER

Bedtime prayers move apartment walls

giving life to silence as if wings were rising

outside the window.

Snug under his quilt, I read my son his favorite book,

Where the Sidewalk Ends, as snow presses hard against the sill.

Somewhere there is always war,

a desert or city ghetto where boys try to defeat

the enemy with stones,

innocent bodies stacked like cordwood.

Life, that white chip that can disappear as quickly

as a roll of dice while the soul goes on.

Overnight the pond behind our building

is one frozen blank eye. Overnight trees have bared naked arms.

Out of nowhere a hawk dives,

its eye a great reticulated yellow orb.

I pull my son into my arms just in time,

my child who will always be too young to wade

through sauna jungles,

to hide waist deep in mined rice paddies,

to sleep with one eye open.

Late evening sun transforms the prism in our window

into a rainbow on the wall

all the colors within the body: golden fat, soft

and pulpy like the inside of an orange,

pink intestines, crimson pools that fade to purple.

Our president comes on TV delivering the rat-a-tat-tat

of big guns. Friendly fire. Collateral damage.

I turn down the volume and watch stern men move silent mouths

but still hear their slogans: God is in our cockpit.

I am stronger than you are. Thumb in nose. Far away smart bombs

hone in on targets that have eyes

and hearts, shades of red bleed into the desert.

My hands steady the dulcimer

while my son’s small fingers caress the strings,

bestow tiny bursts of heavenly sharps

and flats, his touch

the trembling wingtip of a dove.

Light candles for his seventh birthday,

angel ...