Ablation

AMENDMENT LITERARY AND ART JOURNAL   + MEDICAL LITERARY MESSENGER

ABLATION

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AMENDMENT STAFF Co-Editors-in-Chief Hallie Chametzky Emily Henderson

MEDICAL LITERARY MESSENGER STAFF Editor-in-Chief Gonzalo Bearman, MD, MPH

Managing Editor & Web Designer Brie Dubinsky, MEd

Associate Editors Sarah Lee, Pre-Med Megan Lemay, MD

STUDENT MEDIA CENTER STAFF Director Allison Bennett Dyche

Designer Ryan Rich

Production Manager Mark Jeffries

Business Manager Jacob McFadden

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without generous funding from VCU’s Division of Student Affairs. Thank you to Allison Bennett Dyche for your unwavering support and championing of this idea, Mark Jeffries for allowing us to add one more production project onto your already too busy calendar, and Jacob McFadden for keeping track of our finances and our snacks. We are also grateful to Dr. Bearman, Dr. Lemay, and Brie Dubinsky; it is a rare treat to receive both institutional support and creative freedom, and it allowed this project to shift and grow as needed.

Special thanks to all of the VCU departments and programs who shared our call for submissions with your students, faculty, and staff. As a brand new project, your access to creative communities was invaluable to us. We are grateful to the outstanding pool of artists and writers who made our decision process challenging, and to the Amendment and Medical Literary Messenger communities for their constant support. Finally, thank you to the healthcare professionals already working to create an ethical, empathetic, patientcentric medical field, and to the many activists and vocal citizens championing the same.

HALLIE CHAMETZKY EMILY HENDERSON Amendment Literary and Art Journal

SARAH LEE Medical Literary Messenger

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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

In illness and death there is an abject nakedness in which we confront our unifying humanity. Acknowledging this has informed this cross-campus collaboration between The Medical Literary Messenger and Amendment Literary and Art Journal you now hold in your hands. As centers of higher education across the country usher in a new guard of healthcare providers to take the oaths sworn by their predecessors, there is a new emphasis on the narratives that inform how we treat an individual — not just a disease or illness.

Cardiac ablation is a surgical procedure in which areas of tissue are scarred in order to correct abnormal rhythm of the heart. We felt Ablation was an apt title. Although a small start, it is a start nonetheless as we hope to continue changing the rhythm of healthcare — humanizing it through creative expression and emphasis on the human condition. We would like to thank all the talented members of the VCU community that contributed to this publication. We hope that Ablation encourages you to share your story, as we all have one to share.

With warmth,

THE MLM & AMENDMENT TEAM

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INHERITANCE Samantha Poelstra

I think, in this, it is right to talk of fire. Remember in reverence: the scorching cleanse. I imagine my Grandmother’s house before I was born, my own Mother a child no more than fifteen, digging trench lines and laying foundation for a family home. Now, nothing of evidence left, not the months of bric a brac, child’s play, nothing from the build site. Trees offer a remembrance that is older than the body. It grows sharp, sharper still when the hospital bill comes.

Do you also dream of snakes? In mine, a thrashing in that meadow. Hare and snake meet.

The snake grows a hand, holds it taut and waits for the hare to bite it off. They bow to one another, the bloodied hare still chewing as it speaks.

“Do you have insurance?” it says.

A clipboard appears. My full name is at the top, along with my credit history, earning potential.

Cackles from the edge of the forest. The snake’s fangs fall into the razored grass. The fangs grow into my mother and little brother. Mom’s trailer appears at the south of the clearing, right as repo men with no faces appear to take it away. The hare flicks its tail in waiting, somewhere pockets growing fat. At my side, my brother is teaching me how to make peanut butter and jelly.

First, he spreads the peanut butter on both sides. “Don’t want soggy bread, do you?” he says.

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Police sirens sound from the north. Across the clearing, Mom consoles the snake with no fangs.

“You didn’t have use for them, anyway.” She laughs so hard her dentures fall out.

Next, my brother spreads strawberry jelly along each piece, while walls spring up around him. A door in the distance locks.

“Meth and suboxone, schizophrenic ideation.”

The doctor whispers in my ear. I close my eyes.

When I open them, I am running down a fluorescent hospital corridor.

I’m clutching Mom’s pain pills in my right hand, my brother’s ER bills in my left. The nearest door reads PSYCH. I knock, and the hare opens the door, screams, “It’s a drug problem!”

Before slamming it shut. The next door: REHAB. I knock, faster now. The snake whispers, “We’re sorry, but your brother’s symptoms are consistent with ongoing psychosis.

We cannot treat him until his condition is controlled.”

The doorway bursts into flames.

From the meadow, my Mom calls 9-1-1. Two police officers round the hospital corner towards me. “Give me a bullet,” my brother in my ear.

Inside my sweatshirt, my hand becomes a gun.

You didn’t have use for that, anyway.

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I pass a mirror and see my brother in it.

Become the mirror and see my mother in it.

I pass a fire and see our future there, alive in the data centers of credit reporting agencies, hospital records and prescriptions scrawled in rabid shorthand. Time stretches before I was, I am, and after when I’m gone in every direction.

I pass a mirror and see the three of us sitting around the dining room table, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The bread, green like lottery tickets.

OCD 8

Jini Park

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JEFFERSON HOSPITAL ER, 1959 Molly O’Dell

The hospital is really an old house we pass on the way to church.

A nurse with a stiff white hat looks at the gash through my scalp, takes me to the metal sink, washes my head and shaves off a little bit of hair.

She puts me on a table, under a double-sided blue-green sheet with matched binding around a hole in the middle.

This, she tells me, is a sterile field.

If I do not move, I’ll go home sooner.

The intern sewing up my head, is learning from Dr. Trout, who got up from supper and walked over when dad brought me to the emergency room.

A man and woman bang on the front door, straight down the hall from where I am lying. They shriek and beg for treatment for their child but no one lets them inside.

In the car, on our way home, I ask dad why I got treated but those other people were turned away.

He does not answer for five blocks then, sickened, says they were sent to their hospital on their side of town.

In that moment, and ever since, my father’s reaction to the other family’s treatment became more important to me than the split in my skull.

pgs. 11–13

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UNTITLED JOURNAL ENTRY 02-22-2018 Devon Jones

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SUBSTITUTE HANDCUFFS Sav Keane

The wind churns and I see only, green leaves, and the things we talked about as he drives away with his index finger in his mouth, still pointing.

Where does this place me? A body crumbling while the tide of spring brings in a stench of sperm as glaring as the sunlight.

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pgs. 15–18

TEXAS Kylie Newcomb Artist statement Having struggled with mental illness and recovery from trauma in my recent years, I have been advised, for the first time in my life, to be medicated for my illness. It took me five years to accept that I was sick. It took me two years to rid myself of the guilt from being sexually assaulted twice in two days by different men. I was wading through water up to my eyes all this time. Since being medicated, all of this water has been drained and I am left with a raw form. For all these years I felt as if no one could see through the pool, but now I can feel all these eyes on me; these sympathetic eyes. I am seeing myself, truly, for the first time. I will not allow myself to be a victim any longer, I am alive and healing. I have come home to myself.

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RECOVERY RESUMÉ Jena Gilmore

SKILLS SUMMARY i am making a home i am brushing away the spiders cupping them to toss outside i am building shelves i am building shelves to hold the things i want to keep and when i move far away next time none of those things will come with me i am sweeping the floor i am lighting candles i have left all the windows open to clear out the smell of the neighbor’s smoke but instead of a draft i am getting the flat slaps of heavy rain on the sidewalk and the crack of acorns falling from the oak out front it is Fall and i am making a home knowing it will all be boxes again this time next year EDUCATION i wept today from exhaustion and also for all this body has been through this year; the pain sticks with you, it resides in you for a long while even after doctors say you’re better EXPERIENCE she tattooed my left ankle and three weeks later i broke both of them. prostrate, so still the cat forgets i’m here when you can feel your stitches bleeding but you can’t see how much so you don’t call the doctor the sticky ceiling stars have been glowing here for 14 years, even though I’ve been gone my mother on repotting a plant: it wouldn’t stand up so it may not live can’t fall asleep- i can feel my bones growing at night, creaking like a cornfield I keep thinking about the way her lips meet, almost a purse, mostly a smirk. there are some things you don’t need to worry about before bed. bear with me, bear it with me.

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Left: Above: Right:

RESVERATROL (B) MORPHINE ATROPINE, HYOSCYAMINE, AND SCOPOLAMINE Rob Carter

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REEXAMINED Anonymous

The summer I turned twenty three, two things happened. I graduated from college, finally, with a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies. Exactly a week later, I discovered that I had contracted mononucleosis from a source that to this day is still Unknown. Originally, the cause of my symptoms was Unknown, too.

My legs were up in the stirrups, spread vulnerably wide, as the doctor at the Student Health Center poked around my pelvis. At first she thought I might have an infection because the glands in my groin were swollen to the size of hard-boiled eggs. However, nothing else was visibly wrong with me. To be sure, she wanted to have another pair of eyes look me over and give a second, doctorly opinion. She asked if it was okay if the doctor was male. Sudden, unwarranted panic rose in me like a wave of nausea and I burst into tears, startling us both. Embarrassed, I nodded my head saying that it was fine, I was fine, it was all fine. I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes and tried to slow my breathing as she hurried from the room to find another female doctor to evaluate me.

Rather quickly, though, I did calm down. Another woman M.D. checked me out, I was tested for mono, and sent gently on my way. The panic evaporated as mysteriously as it had appeared and in a matter of days my brain fogged up and I could hardly leave my bed from the symptomatic exhaustion.

I forgot about the incident entirely until about seven months later. I was walking to work one morning when the memory returned. The cause of my strange outburst surfaced from the void the way an image appears on photographic paper as it swirls around in a tray of developer. It only took a minute.

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I’d had a male doctor once. He was filling in for my usual pediatrician, who was out of town. I was eleven, a tomboy, and in those days dressing myself in baggy jeans, cotton t-shirts and a backwards baseball cap from my little league team. My chest was more or less flat and I hadn’t gotten my period yet.

I was still a child. Lying on my back on the examining table I already felt nervous. This doctor was a stranger, and the shyness young girls have about the impending change of their bodies had already begun to unfurl in me like a banner made of something soft.

I remember his hands. Big, thick hands that he washed with antibacterial soap before he touched my nipples and told me I’d have nice breasts soon. He asked if I could feel the tissue starting to grow, as he fingered them casually, like buttons on a sweater. My words left me stranded. Packed their bags and split. I just stared at the white paneled ceiling, searing with shame. Afterwards, my mother returned to the room, and I remember her saying later in the car that she didn’t like this doctor because he told her she needed to drink milk. The rest of the memory blurs into a blankness. I don’t know what else happened. But I do know that I cry unexpectedly in doctor’s offices. And that I harbor, somewhere deep, the frightening feeling of complete helplessness imprinted when someone big abuses their power over someone small. The echoes reverberate, and I feel them shaking.

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

ROB CARTER Adjunct Faculty, VCUarts British-born and now US-based, artist Rob Carter received his BFA from Oxford University and later an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York. He has shown his work internationally, with solo exhibitions at Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco), Galerie Stefan Röpke (Cologne), Art In General (NYC), and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere (Rome). Carter has also exhibited at König Galerie in Berlin, ICA in San Jose, Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, The Field Museum in Chicago, ICA in Philadelphia and Museum of Arts and Design in New York. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships at numerous institutions including McColl Center for Art+Innovation (Charlotte), LMCC’s Workspace Program (NYC), and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

JENA GILMORE Alumni, VCUarts, Class of 2017 Jena Gilmore is a Richmond-based artist and maker who received their BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, where they co-founded and served as President of Curation at VCU, an organization dedicated to providing undergraduates with curatorial education and exhibition experience. They recently attended Art Farm, a residency in Nebraska, and serve on the steering committee for Iridian Gallery, the only gallery in the American South dedicated to representing the LGBTQ+ community. They are also a studio coordinator and craftsperson for the Richmond-based metalworking studio McKinnon & Harris.

DEVON JONES Alumni, Wilder School, Class of 2012 Devon Jones is an artist and independent content-creator living in Richmond, Virginia. After graduating from VCU’s Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, he spent five years serving diverse communities statewide with local Departments of Social Services.

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SAV KEANE Former Student, English and Psychology, 2014-2016 Sav Keane is a 22-year-old writer and restaurant worker with chronic pain.

His work focuses mainly on the nature of suffering and mental illness and its influences on interpersonal relationships as well as day-to-day life. Much of his writing centers around the illumination of seemingly-insignificant details and how enduring pain can affect one’s perception.

KYLIE NEWCOMB Undergraduate, VCUarts Kylie Newcomb is a 20-year-old photographer based in Richmond, Virginia with roots in Chesapeake, where she was raised by her mother alongside her younger brother, Nicholas. Newcomb is currently in her third year of study at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is working toward a BFA in Photography & Film. Her work delves into the idea of home, and the way it manifests in both the material and spiritual realms. Through self-portraiture and representation of women, Newcomb’s work explores healing, identity, and selfhood. At its core, her art is an attempt to showcase raw and vulnerable beauty.

MOLLY O’DELL Alumni, MCV, Class of 1980 Molly’s poems and non-fiction reflect her experiences as a physician, mother, lover, friend, daughter, sister, writer, dirt digger and student of the woods. Her first chapbook, Off the Chart, was published in 2016. She lives in Buchanan, Virginia.

JINI PARK Undergraduate, VCUarts Jini Park is a junior student in the Painting + Printmaking department. She loves to travel and try new foods/activities of different cultures!

SAMANTHA POELSTRA Alumni Samantha Poelstra is a femme writer in Phoenix, a long-time lover of folk stories and fables, and believer that all humans deserve a life of dignity.

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AMENDMENT amendmentvcu.com amendmentvcu@gmail.com @AmendmentLit @amendmentvcu @amendmentvcu MEDICAL LITERARY MESSENGER med-lit.vcu.edu medlit@vcuhealth.org @MedLitVCU @medlitmessenger @MedLitVCU 26

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