On Tuesday I attended a session of a new UW Medicine program called Poetry & Prose Rounds. Its website offers the following description:
Writing about and through illness can change lives and enrich health care. This is the murky realm of narrative medicine, the hybrid offspring of medicine and literature. In this lunchtime seminar we will practice close reading of examples of narrative medicine from authors ranging from Chekhov, Alcott and Whitman, to Ehrenreich and Gawande. Through a series of guided writing prompts we will write pieces of our lives in the context of illness and health care.
Writing about health care isn’t quite the same as singing about science, but … close enough, right? I decided to check it out.
The theme of the day was ambivalence. Before discussing “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, we were asked to make a list of ten things about which we felt ambivalent, then write about one of them. I quickly completed my list, covering every major aspect of my life. Now, which one should I complain about in detail? I chose the topic of grant proposals and soon found myself recopying the lyrics of Ten Percent Chance, a song I had composed while in the throes of preparing three proposals simultaneously:
I haven’t written lately;
Been busy in the lab.
You know I’ve had some setbacks,
But I’m taking another stab.I know this new proposal
May catch you a bit off-guard,
But I’ve smartened up, and I’m willing to work hard….I’ve got a ten percent chance with you,
But there’s a nine-in-ten chance we’re through.
And there’s nothing left to do for now but wait.
You have turned me down before,
But I’ve come back wanting more,
Because Specific Aims 1 through 4 are really great!
It felt like cheating to regurgitate previously written words, but I was pleased that I could remember them. I guess you could say I was ambivalent.