From Nurse to Patient to Poet
By Rick Ruggles, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.
Oct. 29–Amy Haddad writes poetry about the vulnerability of patients.
Haddad, director of Creighton University’s Center for Health Policy and Ethics, knows what it’s like to be on the examination table as a patient and beside it as a registered nurse. She battled breast cancer in 1993 and 1999.
The Kent State University Press has published two of her poems in a new anthology titled “Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies.”
Poetry, Haddad said, comes to her at unpredictable moments. While waiting in a grocery line, she said, she noticed needle bruises on the hand and lower arm of another customer, one who clearly had endured extensive medical treatment.
The sentence, “I know where they have been,” came to mind, and she scribbled it into her checkbook.
Later that became a line in a poem titled “Ten Items or Less.”
Haddad’s poems in the new anthology are titled “What If They Said?” and “Stereotactic Biopsy.” They describe the impersonal nature of medical treatment. Part of the latter poem, for instance, reads: A swish of air, the doctor enters. No preliminaries to the tech or me. Without warning, A sharp burning in my breast. I gasp.
“Yes, I think there’s probably some anger there,” the author acknowledged.
Haddad, 54, said she writes poetry partly to describe the loss of control a person feels when becoming a patient.
“I didn’t want to forget what that was like,” she said.
Her experiences as a patient also led her to question her own sensitivity during nearly 15 years as a registered nurse. She knows now how important it is to ask, “How’s it really going?” or to say, “This must be really hard.”
Because health care professionals treat many patients, day in and day out, they tend to forget the intense emotions that a patient may be feeling, she said. Her poetry can remind professionals of this.
“Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies,” is available online at www.kentstateuniversitypress.com or by calling 800-247-6553.
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