where does your story begin?

 

 

 

 

?? Chapter One ??

 

An ugly scar. A permanent limp. A weak heart. The aftermath of childhood illness can last a lifetime.

 

You think you're over it when the sight of a little blood or the thought of getting a shot catapults you back in time to a place you'd rather forget. One moment you're a fully functioning adult. The next, you're a sobbing three-year old. Like a stain you can't get out, like a fog that never lifts, it stays with you.

 

Trivial details rise up out of nowhere with perfect clarity. An aide unloading the lunch cart. The "No Smoking" sign by the door. The pile of Little Golden books stacked on your nightstand.

 

Moments you'd rather not remember surface uninvited. Your mother in tears at your bedside. The way you cried yourself to sleep at night. The jab of a needle and the dull ache that lingered until the next shot was due. You still feel it.

 

Even if you recovered completely, memories of the ordeal can shadow you all your life. Perhaps as an adult you still use a night light to dispel the fear you felt when visiting hours ended and the nurses turned down the lights in the children's ward. Maybe you struggle with asthma because of the way the nurses held you down in order to draw your blood. Smothering you. Maybe your gut still cramps up the way it did when the doctors lined up around your bed and insisted upon pushing on your belly right where it hurt worst. Every last one of them.

 

Or perhaps you still have trouble swallowing pills because you were too young to get them down when you were sick. Instead, your mother crushed them and slipped the powder into applesauce or pudding in a futile effort to mask its bitter taste. Maybe your favorite threadbare teddy is still packed away in a chest somewhere in the attic. All visceral reminders of the ordeal you endured as a child.

 

Traumatic memories can release an outpouring of emotions that can stop you in your tracks. Something as simple as getting your flu shot, or having your blood pressure taken, or hearing an ambulance in the distance with its siren wailing can set the whole thing off again. Palms sweating. Heart racing. Hands shaking.

 

I was three years old when I went into the hospital. How is it I remember the exact arrangement of the beds in the children's ward? The pattern of the afternoon sunlight reflected across the wall? The name of the girl in traction across the room from me? Alice. Ten-years old.

 

How does it all come back to me in technicolor detail when some days I can't remember what I ate for breakfast?

*

"Nothing fixes a thing

so intensely in the memory

as the wish to forget."

~Michel de Montaigne~



 

Your comments are welcome...

jan

 

 





 

 













the power to heal

The motivating principle behind the study and practice of narrative medicine is the conviction that storytelling has the power to heal, not just psychologically and emotionally, but physically, as well.

“Dancing, singing, storytelling and silence

are the four universal

healing salves.”

~Gabriella Roth~

It is easy enough to understand how an uplifting story can raise one’s spirits. Let’s say you have been diagnosed with cancer. Hearing the stories told by people who have faced the same thing and have healed can offer hope, optimism, and strength for the journey you are about to embark upon. Ok, so you feel better emotionally and psychologically. The question is, does this shift in the psyche translate into physical healing?

Consider the vast literature concerning the mind-body connection. One simple but compelling case in point: the disappearance of warts with self-hypnosis. Pretty straightforward. We are also aware of the accumulating research on neuroplasticity and the effect of meditation and visualization on the course of illness. We have learned about the neural connections that modulate the release and function of stress and growth hormones, and how those processes influence our physiology.

“The purpose of storytelling

is not to tell you how to think,

but to give you

questions to think upon.”

~Brandon Sanderson~

In addition, there’s this: the demonstration of neural coupling on functional MRIs during storytelling. Researchers scanned the brains of storytellers and their listeners before and during storytelling. While different areas of the brain were active before the story began (maybe the listener had skipped breakfast and was focused on where he would go to pick up lunch, while the storyteller was worried he might leave something out), as the listener became engaged in the story, the scans changed. They came to mirror one another. The same areas of the brain started to light up in both the storyteller and the listener…proof that the person sitting across from you has the power to affect you physically by how he engages with you mentally.

This is no great secret. We have all experienced a racing heart while watching a thriller on TV, or shed a few tears during a sad interlude at the movies. And, who hasn’t lost track of time while reading a good book? Something happened to our bodies while we were engaged with the story.

In the medical setting, the storyteller is the patient. The listener is the physician or provider. Their brains come into synch by virtue of their mutual engagement in the process of obtaining the medical history. Their physiology changes. We can measure changes in hormone levels and we can scan for changes in electrical activity in the brain. They become connected.

“There isn’t a stronger

connection between two people

than storytelling.”

~Jimmy Neil Smith~

If a story can bring us to tears…or to laughter…it doesn’t take much to imagine that it can affect our health and wellbeing…whether through a mindful change in our attitude or behavior, or a beneficial surge in certain hormones.

This is why narrative has a role in the practice of medicine. Both the patient who is telling his story and the physician who is listening to it are affected not only cognitively, but physically, as well.

“Storytelling is the essential

human activity.

The harder the situation,

the more essential it is.”

~Tim O’Brien~

jan

layer upon layer

 

Like most of you, I was horrified to awaken on Sunday morning to news of a second mass shooting in less than two days this weekend. El Paso and Dayton. As reality started to sink in, it occurred to me how many layers there are to these stories.

"Man is unique in

organizing the mass murder

of his own species."

~Aldous Huxley~

The unfathomable grief blanketing the friends and families of the victims. The shock. The anger, fear, and sorrow they will shoulder for the rest of their lives.

"No one ever told me

that grief felt so like fear."

~CS Lewis~

The aftermath of trauma the survivors face. The pain. The scars. The horror.

"I'm standing in the ashes

of who I used to be."

~Mallika Dodeja~

 

You have to wonder if the courage and resolve it took for first responders to act at the scene didn't falter just a bit. Maybe, a lot. You have to wonder how those images are carved into their psyches. Into their hearts.

 

And who doesn't want to know what drove two young men to commit mass murder in the first place? Not to excuse them or to forgive them, but to understand how something like that takes root in a human heart. To fathom what it takes to plant the seeds of hatred, violence, and dispassion in the mind of someone who was born an innocent child?

 

What about the parents and families of these two men? Mystery abounds. Speculation grows. Will we ever know the truth? Will we ever hear their stories?

 

"There is no greater agony

than bearing an untold story

inside you."

~Maya Angelou~

 

What about the nurses and doctors who dropped everything to tend to the mass influx of trauma patients on short notice. How did they get through it?
 

Does it help those of us who practice narrative medicine to tell our stories? Does anyone benefit from hearing them? What can we learn from victims and patients? What can killers teach us?

 

SUDDEN

~by Nick Flynn~

 

If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper

might have used the word massive,

as if a mountain range had opened

inside her, but instead

 

it used the word suddenly, a light coming on

 

in an empty room. The telephone

 

fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating

something happened, something awful

 

a sunday, dusky. If it had been

terminal, we could have cradled her

as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,

 

said good-bye. But it was sudden,

 

how overnight we could be orphaned

& the world become a bell we'd crawl inside

& the ringing all we'd eat.

 

jan