The Art of Medicine
Posted on Thu, Nov 10, 2011 @ 08:43 AM
Some of you know that I am a writer as well as a doc. My heroes, in addition to the medical greats, are Keats, Chekhov, Williams, Coulehan, Coles and other physician writers.
My creative writing is short. Really short. If it isn’t poetry, it scans like poetry. And one act plays. Some of my recent work is incorporated into a small collection, The Ride, available from Amazon and Whirlybird Press.
I recently took a vacation and was looking for ideas for a long form piece. Background, inciting event, first-act turn, the back and forth of act two, and the third act, with the climax and conclusion. Get into a scene late and out early. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Cut the beginning and cut the end. If you can’t tell a story with nouns and verbs, don’t bother. That sort of thing.
I was soaking in the pool when a kid splashed in. Typical thirteen year old, full of joy. What was different about him was he had a scar from his tummy to his neck, with a tracheostomy scar at the top. He offered his hand in introduction, and from his speech I could tell he was deaf. He was a good lip-reader, though his parents also signed for him.
This kid turned out to be the oldest living patient with his syndrome, which included Ondine’s Curse—whenever he went to sleep he stopped breathing. He had an electrical problem in his brain. So he had slept every night of his life with a nurse and a breathing monitor.
No matter what I did, sleep problems were all around me. The next day I went to meet a guy who made the best musical instrument of its kind in the world. Turns out neither he nor his number two could sleep. I told him he had sleep apnea and his number two probably had periodic limb movement disorder.
I went back to the pool, and in jumped a seventy year old with polymyalgia rheumatica. I knew his history before he told it. He was sleepy and his countenance was as bitter as bile.
Lives focused through the lens of medicine will burn your eyes if you look directly into them. So I look to the side when I’m out of the office. Still, the lens never turns completely off.
So where was I? Inciting event, character…
- Vernon Rowe, MD is a neurologist and Founder MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute