Danielle is a post-doctoral research fellow at Brigham & Women's Hospital. Keep up with her exciting work by following her on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dkpua
A Sum of Threads
Our medical school library was a social hub, filled with chatter. During the exam week, the chatter dies out and gets replaced with shared glances. We converse with side-eyes. There’s still so much to learn. That’s not the first exam, why are you on anatomy? I can cram the rest, just not anatomy. It’s 10 pm, you don’t have time. Shut up. Then at 10 pm, we shut our books and computers in unison, shove water bottles into our bags, and trudge out. After exam season, the chatter builds up again. Ten of us congregate around four person tables. We catch up as if we hadn’t just been in class together for 3 hours. The studious among us shoot death glances for speaking too loud. It deters no one.
At the time, our school dean Dr Brigido Carandang was in the habit of doing social rounds during the lunch hour. I met him over a pack of chips, after a meeting with editors of the newsletter Iatros. Dr Brigs doesn’t like to talk about medicine—with 9 hours a day in classrooms, we’re entrenched already. We’re already in the gutters. Later that year, I read a poem at our annual art exhibit. Dr Brigs says there’s someone I should meet. From the trenches, someone sees my face.
Dr Joven Cuanang invites me to his Pinto Art Museum. I know it. Among local neurologists, it’s the stuff of legend. On weekends, there are dance classes for Parkinson’s Disease patients. Dr Cuanang himself is an enigma. I first knew of him as the mentor of all my mentors—a founding father of sorts. In his sanctuary, there is no dichotomy between art and medicine. In one room, wire sculptures form an open chested figure, into which another’s hand reaches in. In an alcove, the stench of jute permeates. Two mixed media works made of burlap canvas face each other. Threaded across are wool and cotton give rise to a pair of birds staring straight at a nest with two white eggs, as if saying “We birthed this. We call them ours.”
We meet over drinks, and go through the usual pleasantries. We talk about school: how am I adjusting to my paces, what do I think about my classes. Then we talk poetry and prose. We talk about my current fixation—Maggie Smith’s Good Bones.
This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Peppered through medical school, Dr Cuanang would get me to come up and do a reading. I oblige, mostly because it gets me to write more. Our friendship revolved around these poems. After classes and patients, I’d wrestle with how textbook concepts translated to clinical practice. How do we help patients cope with illness? How do we help them understand? How do we effectively care for each patient while managing a whole panel? How do we take a thread thrown out into the void, and make sense of it? There’s no good answer. It all depends.
I enjoy leaning into the messiness of patient care. The humanness of it all set us apart from "Doctor Google.” Naturally, this messiness takes its toll. There is a need to process what we’ve seen. During my clinical years, poetry became my weekly debrief—other people’s illnesses distilled into lines. I am often a poem's only audience, but I don't think the poems mind. I assume they’re just happy to exist. After particularly hard weeks, I listen to The Slowdown in which someone else reads a stranger’s poems to me.
In my head, there was a dichotomy between my clinical and my literary interest. I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but that shifted. I realized there were no walls. Not really. There is a room you build yourself. And you can fill it with whatever you’d like. In my senior year, I decided that neurology was a field where I could keep these two parts of me in the same room. It was a budding plant in my personal ecosystem. The more I watered it, the more it made the place feel like home. Shortly after, I moved to Boston for a few research years before residency.
“Boston suits you,” Dr Cuanang said when I relayed the news. I say I want to do residency in the US. “You’ll do it.” It’s a statement. As if he’s wiping his hands after a day’s work. That's that. The devil, I say, is how—applications, interviews, the Match. We talk shop until there’s nothing left to say. I say I’ll let him know if I make it. He’s lost in thought, now. His eyes glazed over, and he recounted his basement apartment downtown, somewhere near Mass General Hospital. In his straw hat and rubber slippers, he recounts the cold. These are things I myself have come to associate with Boston—tiny apartments and wind drafts.
In September, I sent in a bunch of applications. In October, there are more poems than there are interviews. I’ll know for sure in March. In the mornings, I head to morning report. It’s all clinical. Juxtaposed against my current role as a researcher, I long for it. Leaving your hometown does that to you. I grasp for things I used to have (or never had). I write about seasons I’m only now living through, and how round the birds get in the winter. I’ll look back at all these poems and remind myself I’m not taking steps back. It’s just another thread woven into the bigger pattern. I’ll turn 50 one day and admire all the woven threads: collected and summed up. Look, look at all that I can now call mine.
Now, You’re 60
To me, it’s still mint
condition, but
side by side
spot the difference :
gravity pulling
at the corners,
eyes and lips
that fight it.
More energy cashed in
just to pull up and smile.
How’d I miss it? The
shaking, twitch, slow walk.
So much life
between the floorboards, and up the
stairwell that’s slumped its back
as we do. Slowly, press my cheek
in the warm summer dirt. Eavesdrop
on the ants. The grandkids do this.
But their knees bend with ease. I lay here
still. Cold sweat from getting up, cold dread
of remaining. But at least it’s warm, and
I’m to sink in, and won’t slip
on unseen frost.
It’s all the same to me—your laugh still
a song to keep on loop.
I’ll keep a copy in my back pocket for good measure—safe,
and still in love. Still sunshine, and first snow.
The baby (now grown) will find it. Then, there
is no comparison. Just you.
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