The Art of Healing
Thomas Rooney, COM '20
The group sponsored workshops and writing prompts during such events as the OMS Day of Wellness. One prompt asked students to write or draw places they left behind, or scars they carry. One female student wrote about waiting for a safe place to share her story. Another male student wrote about being in the military and the dichotomy between taking and saving lives. The founding members wanted the project to be sustainable as second-year students leave for rotations, and decided that the passing of the torch from one class to another also mimicked the continuity of care model.
The importance of what they started truly sunk in with the death of a first-year COM student in 2017. Arooba remembers reading a piece in the Akesis that a classmate had written and feeling connected despite not knowing her. “It turned something tragic into something positive,” she recalls. The power of narrative reflection is its ability to transform. “If you take the time to write and reflect, it helps you and the patient,” Arooba insists. She remembers a patient of hers with MS; she took time to sit with her and ask her story. The patient taught her about what it was like living with MS; she became a real person, not just the diagnosis for which she had been hospitalized. “Technology records but doesn’t bear witness,” she states. Human interactions are often listlessly automated: mechanic. Human connections can be brief, hard and even painful… but there is also meaning in the space in-between. According to the COSGP, 54% of physicians have burnout, and 15-30% of medical students experience depressive symptoms. For Arooba, there is no choice. “Publish or perish.”
Thomas Rooney, a third-year medical student at UNE COM, took to the podium to share a project he participated in as part of the Humanities in Medicine (HuMed) program. He did his research project on pediatric illness narratives called pathographies, which have the unique ability to present underrepresented voices of children. Traditional medical narratives often neglect the pediatric illness experience, and he was interested in how pathographies could expand the definition. For him, pathographies are legitimate and useful forms of narrative medicine that can increase the efficacy of care for our patients.
He observed the progressive narrative of a young, 17-year old female patient dying of cancer. She used drawings to express her own internal processes and feelings. A sketched self-portrait reflected the internalization of her own fear and questions surrounding death and dying. The solo images revealed her loneliness, isolation and sense of injustice. They highlighted the loss of identity, self, and health. In drawings of her conversations with her physicians, she is silent. The adults talk around her illness, around her death, around her. Thought bubbles appear as thoughts that remain unspoken, unacknowledged, and unanswered.
Thomas wants nothing more than to bridge the silence, and asks the audience what the pathographies communicate about her illness that would never have been realized in any other way? Untraditional narratives such as pencil drawings have the ability to welcome the expression of thoughts and feelings, voices to be heard, and patients to be seen. He urges his peers and other health professionals to consider what the development of new tools can bring; perhaps the marriage of creative expression and medicine can become an art of healing.