After a history of crippling endometriosis, this woman had an arduous, ongoing struggle with her healthcare community for the right to have a hysterectomy. She was finally granted approval at the age of 29. “It had been like pulling teeth, but finally I felt free,” she told me.

Her childhood was infused with Hawaiian-Polynesian music and dance, taught to her father by his mother. Today, this poemee is the Director of the PhD program in Biomedical and Translational Sciences. She has used HeLa cells for decades. Her life’s work is to connect the unbelievable discoveries of molecularly focused pre-clinical research directly to the patient experience of treatment.

She is a single mother born to a single mother and had to grow up fast. She is juggling a sticky work situation, her own anxiety and depression, and being away from home and her kids.

Instead of the usual Listener Poet format – listening to one person’s story and responding with a framing narrative and custom poem – I was invited to create a group poem for forty participants at the Arts in Healing luncheon, hosted by the Inova Health Foundation in partnership with the board.

What does it mean for people living with Sickle Cell Disease to be seen, heard, and understood? For this person, it meant finding – and using – her voice to advocate for herself and for others.

“I’ve experienced a lot of big losses,” she said, referencing the passing of a grandfather and two uncles who did not survive their cancer diagnoses. “There were others too.”

Professionally, Lacks’ story represents for her the need to critically examine our research infrastructure generally. “We need to pay more attention to the sustainability of research,” she explained. “Private companies benefit from publicly-funded research without a requirement to give back to ensure the viability of future research.”

“The fact of my life is a miracle,” she told me. Living with multiple chronic illnesses, this patient spoke to me of her journey with alopecia. Of how, in witnessing her body transformed by the condition, she continues to move at once through grief and reclamation.

“I can’t see a future outside of our relationship,” she tells me, “but I also can’t see a future outside of residency.”

“I always believe, no matter what the doctor says, that I will be cured,” she says as her sister sits next to her.

“I was at a crossroads about what to do with the rest of my life.”

For many years, this patient has avoided confrontation in pursuit of peace.

His empathy only reminded him that he could not help those in pain.

She spoke about the ways this traumatic event shaped who she is today: a person with an “unshakeable peace” born of deep faith,

She wanted to help people feel comfortable and transform the shame around colon issues. "I want to talk about things that matter, the things people don't want to discuss.

"Death, in many ways, ignites new life for the ones left behind."

When we met, she was coming off a stretch of nine 14-hour shifts. She was tired but in good spirits.

Residency was challenging, and there were times when it felt chaotic.

“I wonder if these medical professionals, in caring for people who face such insurmountable odds, walk around all the time carrying this weight I’m hauling now.”

"I don’t know what I’m doing,” but this time, she admonished the negative self-talk.

She reflected on how her resilience was born from moments of shared mirth amid life's trying chapters.

“Life is complex and dirty, but digging in is important to me,” she said. “Maybe if more of us understood history, we could understand each other better.”

We are expected to research, contribute to scholarship,  earn grants – all on our own time.

We are expected to research, contribute to scholarship,  earn grants – all on our own time.

Every day, I try to see through the patient lens, and I ask: what can we do to change this broken system?

This past year, he was a right defensive tackle on his school football team, but for the past two and a half years, he’d been caring for his dad, who had cancer.

“I’m trying to focus on doing little things to make people feel better during everything that’s going on in the world,” she told me.

“It’s hard to see others struggle,” she said. “How can I help with their struggle without struggling myself?”

"I'd tell her it's OK to be loud...it's OK to challenge and to bring all of you into these spaces where no one looks like you..."

She was in the depths of transition and change in this “concentrated time.”

Retired from the military, she was brought back into nursing during the COVID pandemic.

“I'm continuously questioning: did I do it right?" she said. "I’ve always done a good amount of second-guessing, but I’m re-learning how to show up differently.”

"It changed me; It changed the way I look at life," said this woman about her profound experience during her pregnancy.

“I’m not in a good place with everything happening in the world,” this poemee said.

“It’s been more challenging than normal lately,” she said. “I’m only one person. It's a struggle for me to say no, but I can’t do everything that’s being asked of me right now.”

"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.

"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.

“I like feeling small,” he told me. “Nature has always made me feel small.” He described the sense of wonder that feeling gave him.

He had been trying to cope with the grief ever since and was on a quest for soul-searching and meaning-making.

"I feel like this journey is unfolding before me,“ he said.

This physician had recently started a new job when the pandemic hit.

“I feel like I have decision fatigue,” she told me. It was normal for her to make many choices at work, but COVID had dramatically increased the number of medical decisions she had to make at home.

“I know ‘vibe’ is kind of a nonspecific term, but I think about people’s vibes all the time,” he said.“ Sometimes you come into a room and it’s just off.

This physician discussed being the only one in his practice network with expertise in patients with a specific type of chronic pain.

“Our constituents are uniquely affected by the pandemic,” they said. This poemee was an educational psychologist who spoke about how much they missed working in person with med students, healthcare staff, and medical educators.

"I grew from the experience – though I think it aged me 10 years!" This is how a resident described a turning point with a specific patient when he recognized how burned out he was.

Although he had been through many stressful experiences in his life and recently, he always held onto his positive outlook. He took particular care to use words intentionally, paying attention to their connotations, so that his positivity extended to those that he interacted with as well.

“There’s a constant feeling inside that I should be doing more,” she said. “But I also want to be kind to myself and recognize all that I’ve given.”

These members of the Wellness team in the Department of Neurology at the University of Colorado each spoke about the importance of community and connection.

She said she wanted a poem about the importance of CPR. As both a nurse and a CPR instructor, she spoke about how the rhythms of certain familiar songs helped her students internalize the rate of compression required.

He brought the tools of mindfulness and self-care to medical students, many of whom had been studying all this past year, 10 hours a day, day after day, in isolation.

The pandemic had forced this woman to slow her life down drastically. Before, she’d travelled around every month for work, never stopping, working hard because she cared about her job. The slower pace created by social distancing had reminded her to cherish everything that life had to offer outside of work.

He had recently lost his father to COVID-19 and was reflecting on forgiveness. For the majority of his life with his father, they did not have a positive relationship. However, in the last three years of life, his father lost his memory and his personality changed into someone who was loving and kind.

“When you get to hear the hidden sides of people’s stories, you never look at people the same,” she said, with a noticeable tenderness in her voice. This woman was a therapist who supported physicians and residents. “Sometimes as I lay in bed at night I inhabit the stories people share with me.”

She began her career as a hospice volunteer and then worked as a critical care provider in the Emergency Department for many years. She told me she always wanted her patients to feel empowered while in her care. “This feeling has to do with quality of life,” she said.

For a long time, he had used songwriting to turn his own emotions into artwork, but in the past eight years he had turned the process into a service for others. He’d learned that listening to people’s stories and reflecting them back in an artistic format was a cathartic experience for them.

This person described himself as a dreamer. As he spoke, he painted a particularly clear and vivid vision of the future he saw possible for the VA. He worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and his passion for the work was evident and inspiring.

“When everything else stops, we keep going,” she began. This woman had always wanted to be a physician, and as a medical school student, was about to become the seventh generation of physicians on her mother’s side of the family.

She was tired after working twelve straight days on her current rotation. It was her third year of medical school, and she was already feeling burnt out. “I have five more years like this,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘Keep pushing, you can get through it,’ but I don’t know if I can.”

This woman was part of a small but mighty team that ran the Innovation Ecosystem within the VA. She arrived visibly excited to share about their work, and after learning more about it, I understand why.

He had been thinking a lot about race over the past several months. He’s a White man with two children: a 20-year-old biological son who is White, and an 18-year-old adopted daughter who is Black.

She’d been in a physician leadership role with the VA for seven years. Over her tenure, she’d never seen the system rise as one team like this. “There’s so much we don’t know about COVID. But our teams are stepping up in ways I could never have imagined.”

He asked for a poem for his dad — “something beautiful and transitory like blossoms or snowflakes,” he said. He talked about what it’s like to see people change over time, through the seasons.

"I struggled to make friends until my junior year of high school," she said. "Then I finally opened up and became friends with so many people." She was now a freshman at Georgetown University and was learning how to bond with her new peers.

Being a poet himself, he was eager to share his word and recite some of his favorite pieces of poetry. He had so much to share, but honed in, requesting a poem about his wife.

We talked when she had a quick break during her shift at the Infusion Center. She told me how important it was for her to make the most of the moments she had to make connections with people.

She said she wanted a poem about her mother, who died in October at the age of 90. She painted a compelling portrait of a mother who loved glitter, high heels, and jewelry, while living on a dairy farm.

She immediately knew that she didn’t want her poem to be about cancer. She wanted it to be about friendship and asked if she could share a recent story.

She was very proud of her daughter and has hopes for “a bright future that’s as pain free as possible”

“I’ve always loved hearts,” she said. She was a cardiac nurse who had been drawn to a job in the catheterization laboratory. “It’s so rare to have an opportunity to immediately do something good for somebody, but it happens often in the cath lab,” she told me.

She talked about how hopeful med students feel when they first start out, and told me she worried that it would get harder for doctors to hold onto hope and empathy the further along they were in their careers.

“I have a lot of unresolved grief,” she confessed. It was her grief that made her good at empathizing with the hospice community she served. “Would resolving my grief make me less effective with my patients?”

She worked as an interpreter at Schar and wanted her poem to be “thanks for allowing me.” Her background in a very repressive regime gave her a unique perspective about the gift of being able to live here, although she had felt anxiety for the past few years.

"I’m ensconced in the system." He was getting paid quite well to do his job in the healthcare sector, but he had internal conflict about how the system worked. He asked me, "Did you know that about 50% of healthcare dollars are spent on the last six months of life?"

“Relationships — children, grandparents, siblings, spouses, parents are all a reflection of your journey,” she said. “They can be fulfilling or agonizing."

“It feels like time is running out to make big changes,” she shared. The last 6 months were full of transition in all aspects of her life.

Being in healthcare can be extremely rewarding, but it comes with the occupational hazard of loss. This woman loved the work she did with dementia patients and the connections she was able to form with them. However, she also struggled with the frequent loss of people she had bonded with.

The five of them work together in a Pediatric ER unit. “People die here,” one exclaimed, and part of their job is to bring light to a dark place.