Writing from Previous Workshops

These pieces demonstrate the courage and beauty that women have discovered during the course of a Sacred Cliffs workshop.

FEMALE PHYSICIANS

THAT OTHERS MIGHT LIVE
During my residency a student was stabbed coming home from buying a soda at the White Hen Pantry. He was not part of the usual "knife and gun club" crowd as we called them then - the screwed-up kids and adults who went about shooting or knifing each other over drugs or money or territory. This kid was, as I eventually learned, a good solid person with a good solid family-not a perfect family, not an affluent family, but a good complex loving family.

So he got stabbed, and he spent hours in our OR getting fixed. 22 units of blood as I remember, blood warmers, the usual havoc and chaos and misjudgments in the OR of what to fix first. And we saved him. Goddammit if we didn't save him. And we rounded day after day on him, through the usual long involved telescoping post-op problems. But he lived. We saved a nice deserving humble kid. And then he died. Over a few days. But he died. We missed his diagnosis (necrotizing fasciitis), and he died literally before our eyes, with multiple attendings and all of the residents standing around doing many things at once, but nothing that saved him.

I missed his diagnosis. I was the chief resident. I led the troops around day after day to care for him. He said his legs hurt. We examined him; we missed it.

I tell myself fairly sanguinely that it was not my fault, and surely the attendings were as lost for a while as I was.

But in my heart of hearts I know his death is mine. I should have advocated for him. I should have shaken the apple tree of diagnoses and loosened more apples, made the attendings look in the right direction. His death is mine.

I think that I gained a type of humility from the experience - that I am as good as the next person, no better. And I gained confidence that I will not undersell those situations again. I can think of at least two patients since then that I saved from the misdiagnoses that were being perpetrated upon them. I think of that boy, and he did truly give his life that others on my watch should live.

--M.K.

BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS

TROPIC OF CANCER
My body is bisected by two long white scars, paralleling one another like lines left in the sand by a retreating tide. The lower scar is faint, stippled with pale marks where stitches put me back together after a doctor had triumphantly lifted a son out of my taut belly. My son… Had I ever heard two happier words? After three miscarriages; three mysterious children who left me before they could try life; now, a son. A child. A completion. The best finish line I ever crossed.

Above this scar wanders another, more recent white line—longer, thicker, more immediate. Where one scar is a testament to joy, the other reflects only pain. “Look at these pictures,” says the surgeon. “This is what we can do for you. It’s pretty amazing how far we’ve come with breast reconstruction.”

I look at the display of women, arms held wide in a crucifixion pose. Imperfect breasts, obvious patch jobs after a major catastrophe. “This is a good job?” I think. “This is progress? I wonder what the first attempts looked like?” I contemplate my choice – lop it off and leave a flat place, a lack everyone will see…a badge of dishonor, a testament to not living right, not having good genes, not eating what I should. Or fill the hole with belly fat and stretch the skin around it, carefully stitching, shaping, coloring, so that in my clothes, if you don’t look too closely, you won’t see there’s no nipple and the shape is a bit different, and it’s a little higher on my chest… Hobson’s choice.

Parallel scars are stark testament: to facing death, and to welcoming life. I choose the imperfect over nothing at all, and out of my belly they carve me a new breast; just as, 15 years before, they carved open my belly and gave me my son, a new life.

--P.J.H.

HOOTERS
After surgery, friends and colleagues from the small NBC affiliate where I worked came to visit me in the hospital. We were all twenty-somethings, aspiring reporters and producers. My friends sat in silence, looking at each other, waiting for someone to speak. We all had plenty of experience writing about illness and death for the nightly news. But this was real and now they didn’t have a camera or pen to hide behind. It was like we were suddenly strangers.

Someone had to do something. So I plunged in. "I guess I won’t be working for a Hooters bar anytime soon!!" Laughter broke the silence, and my friends gathered around me again.

--B.D.

PROTOCOL
The morning before surgery I had casually signed permission for the surgeon to take off the breast if the whatever-it-was was malignant. This was 16 years ago, before needle biopsies, and I was having full anesthesia for the procedure. No problem. Everything will be fine.

Several hours later I awoke back in my room. I felt the dressings binding me chin to waist and I knew.

Three doctors came in separately announcing, "It’s malignant." Like once wasn't enough! Everywhere I went right after my diagnosis, I felt like people were watching me and whispering. I don’t recall participating in treatment decisions. I was told when things would be done – not based on my schedule, but based on “protocol”. It was an interesting relationship between the protocol and my cancer. The alien had invaded my body, and the doctors were going to kill it for me. All I had to do was show up. I was a bystander.

--M.B.

THE MAD WOMAN
The mad woman does not do what others expect her to do. She sings on Main Street. Looks people in the eye and says, "How are you – really?" She speaks in iambic pentameter. She stands up at meetings and demands, When are you people going to stop killing my planet?

She grows wings, leaps off the roof to soar among the yellow maple leaves falling, falling in the morning sun. She knows where the moon is – and why. She slathers her body in oil and salt, shedding her skin like a snake, shedding her old notions of propriety like skin.

The Mad Woman laughs. The Mad Woman weeps. She is present. She lives in the now. The Mad Woman gives cabbage soup to the orphans and tosses twenties into the hat of the banjo busker. She gives away all she has and is rich.

The Mad Woman is mad. She is angry. She denounces the wicked and, wearing black Spandex and flying cape, zooms around the city making litterers pick up their trash and pours patience into the hearts of mothers in laundromats. She stomps on anyone who stomps on a spider.

The Mad Woman is sad. She attends every funeral and wails from the back row, Why, God, have you made us mortal? Why did you save eternal life for the darkness only?

The Mad Woman is out of control – no one, not even the Mad Woman herself, can predict what she will do next.

--S.F.

This writing may not be reproduced without permission.