Twins

Careful readers will notice a 2-year-old girl, Charlotte, named in the A Piece of My Mind essay ( “The Peekaboo Visit)” and the poem (“The Key”) in this JAMA issue. They are the same child. Charlotte is a patient, a daughter, and for a too-brief period a twin sister, and submissions from her pediatrician and mother offered JAMA a rare opportunity to represent a family’s story from 2 pe rspectives. We hear much about shared decision-making, perhaps even shared story-telling, but the attempts of a physician and a mother to express their feelings of guilt and loss in poetic language, to find the words Charlotte was too young to have to grieve for her brother, helps us accompany them in their search for meaning. Poetry leaves us less alone in our private struggles with the limits of medicine’s magic, psychiatrist Jed Myers has written in these pages, and these 2 contributions demonstrate what that feels like. Writing doesn’t reverse loss or take away pain but it honors both, making them mean something. Hopefully, that’s a comfort to the writers and a lesson in empathy and in healing for readers.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research