Heroes Not Zombies

When I was recently on holiday on the Isle of Skye I popped in to An Tuireann for a look around, a bite of lunch (had fabulous home-made, thick chunky oatcakes and crab pate), and to log on to the net via their free wifi connection. While uploading photos to flickr, and writing a post or two for this blog, I got chatting to Mark Goodwin, the Literature Development Officer. A delightful and gentle man. He gave me a few postcards from the Poetry Box and I read the poems on them. They were so good! Here are some extracts I noted –

from At The Shrink, by Angela McSeveny –

I can hear the whisper of his pencil

Against the paper

As he jots down notes.

The point jerks like a seismograph

Measuring the impact of my answers.

I blurt out some startling truth

And watch, baffled,

When his right hand doesn’t move.

Well, I can tell you, that little segment got me re-thinking how I take notes! Amazingly, it had never occurred to me, until I read this, that the movement of my pen on the paper of the patient’s case record might be having an impact on the patient. But more than that, these lines also highlight for me how we all discriminate, categorise and judge what we see, hear, experience. A patient tells their story. I listen, hearing some parts more clearly than others, interrupting, or leading this way or that, according to my interest, and in the process create my version of their story…….which turns out, hopefully, to be similar, but, for sure, will be new, unique and different, co-authored by the pair of us.

from…Night Sister, by Elizabeth Jennings

How is it possible not to grow hard,

to build a shell around yourself when you

have to watch so much pain, and hear it too?

………..

You have a memory for everyone

None is anonymous and so you cure

what few with such compassion could endure

I never met a calling quite so pure.

Reading this again just now, made me think again about that study which measured doctors’ responses to others’ pain. But the last line is the one which really struck me – ‘I never met a calling quite so pure’. You don’t hear much about ‘calling’ any more. Sadly, the current ethos is one of reducing every health carer’s job to a list of tasks and competencies, then assuming that any person who can tick all the correct boxes will be able to carry out exactly the same job. It’s not like that. People matter. The personality, the values and the motivation of a health care worker will shine through, for good or for bad! The new way of selecting young doctors for training posts in the UK uses a computer-based questionnaire system and does not accept the submission of a cv for example, and the candidates for GP training are referred to only by their numbers (to prevent prejudice on the part of the selectors from the candidates’ surnames). How many have a ‘calling’, and would any selector rate such a claim?

And finally, from Elma Mitchell’s, ‘This Poem” –

……even the simplest poem

may destroy your immunity to human emotions

All poems must carry a government warning

Words can seriously affect your heart.

Oh, so true! How a word can sting, burn, wound, comfort, move, excite, quicken or slow the heart! One of my favourite writers is Raymond Carver. He can write both poetry and prose in a way that you can be moved to tears by a tiny handful of his words.

So, what do you think about the relationship between poetry and health? Have you any experiences you’d like to share?