We are pleased to tell you that we have provisionally accepted your Medicine and the Arts (MATA) submission, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," to Academic Medicine. Full acceptance for publication is contingent on journal staff receiving explicit written (e-mail) permission from you to reprint the original poetry, including a request for payment of $100 for reprinting the work. Once we receive this, you will be notified that your submission has been accepted, and we will process the payment...
BOOM!
A while ago, I published a blog post called Medicine in 55 Words. As a third-year, we had monthly "Art of Medicine" conferences, where students and seasoned attending physicians gathered over beer and chocolate, discussing the softer side of medicine, the work/life balance, and humanism. This contrasted with our usual meetings that were scientific and clinical in nature. Out of one gathering came a few short poems, describing medicine in 55 words or less. We were given this exercise in order to better reflect on moments during the year that had deeply affected us. Over the next few days, I tried to describe one of the most poignant moments of my short career to date, a case I scrubbed in on with Dr. Jennifer Hooker, a Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon. I called it "Between a Rock and a Hard Place."
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
by Robert Swendiman
Operating Suite #9. We waited in silence for the pathologist to call.
A 15-month-old boy lay before us. Flaccid, sterile, powerless.
There were only two possibilities, given the X-ray and MRI.
We prayed it wasn't cancer.
"I only see blood, no abnormal cells. No cancer."
Sigh of relief. The diagnosis was child abuse.
When Dr. Meacham emailed us that MATA was calling for submissions, I immediately thought of this poem and the chance to further reflect, almost a year later. And so I began my first journal submission, in conjunction with my mentor, Dr. Robyn Latessa, who is now the Director of the Asheville Program. We wrote a brief tandem reflection on the challenges in medicine that students and veteran physicians face daily. The work will be published in the next couple months, and I look forward to providing y'all the link (I don't think I can reprint the commentary here, because they now own it)! It will be my first submission, as my one publication from my undergrad research doesn't really count - unless you count the number of mice my synthetic compounds must have killed, which was a lot.
I hope that the exercise of writing this blog in itself has improved my writing. It is obviously something I hope to continue as my career progresses. I also hope that "humanism" becomes a greater part of the medical curriculum. In the meantime, I didn't realize that you can get paid for submitting original works, so maybe I should quit my day job and become a poet/short story writer! My mother says not so fast...
I am back in Boston, and now off to San Francisco. More details on that next week.
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