Description

A Chapbook for and by medical practitioners, learners and poets edited by Zamina Mithani.

Contributors:

Candace de Taeye, Ivy Deavy, Annie Foreman-Mackey, Kaylie, Kathleen Klassen, Madeline McKenzie, Lori-Anne Noyahr, Savita Rani, Eleonore Schönmaier, Lauren Seal, Kimberley Thomas, James X. Wang, Laura Zacharin.

From the editor:

The pieces in this collection offer the glimmer of emotion beneath creative line spacing and various nouns that draw attention to feelings of estrangement, pain, and loneliness in healthcare. Sometimes we can be looking at a life-altering moment and feel that we are not really there, but are instead, behind the glass walls of machinery, pharmacology, and diagnosis. And amid all of those variables, there are layers of sound. The sound of the bedside monitor taking vitals, the sound of chatter among teams of nurses and doctors, the sounds of family members, the sounds of wheels moving beds from one ward to another—and our own internal sounds. The pieces in this collection range from the sounds of an arrythmia, violence in the hospital, a medical history, a library review and so much more. They are a combination of our inner monologues and the way we hear our patients, and the way they hear us differently in return. 

The work of creating a medical community that represents its patient population happens when we share our stories to the world, just as patients share their stories to us. Thank you for helping us rebuild the soundscape of medicine, to include all the sounds we know, and inviting those from the outside—the adventitious—back in.