A poem about growing through failure
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All articles filed in David Alderson
Turn, turn, turn
A poem from the frontline of the NHS – a personal psalm for Good Friday
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Physician, anneal thyself
Stress appears an inescapable part of the practice of healthcare, but is a focus on building resilience the best way to approach the problem?
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In the Temple of Mammon
Two hundred hour stints in Mammon’s gold temple, / loneliness tempered by rites which appal
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Gone
Breaking the fences, / bending the boundaries, / blind to the rules that bound / mere mortals
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Safety II
What is the best way to improve the safety and quality of care in clinical practice?
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Dandelion Clocks
Who ever sees their own metamorphosis? / Those glorious suns turn to angst-ridden spheres, / Like unspoken rumours of far away wars
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Loss of Voice
I’d strayed: learnt the ways of a cruel cut-throat gang
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Science and Charity: the Limits of Candour
Openness is often presented as an ultimate Good in clinical practice, but are there healthy limits to empathy and candour, for both patient and carer?
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Growth Rings
Exploring the positive possibilities of mistakes as sources of sources of learning, inspiration, discovery and reconciliation
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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
What happens when we compare our insides with others’ outsides?
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True Cut: Epilogue
Chrissie’s endless / Sisyphean sentence— / the insatiable cycle / of haemo-dialysis— / is finally done. / For today.
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True Cut 9
time is not the great healer / that some would suppose: but rather a dealer in counterfeit truth / a practiced deceiver in layers of story
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True Cut 8
The tangle of tubes that’s kept Chrissie alive / for the past seven days, now scares her to death
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True Cut 7
All through a long, lonely, longing night’s vigil / Jo is engulfed by a darkening ocean / of grief, guilt and shame, swept / out on a rip tide of rising despair
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True Cut 6
Listen: / the theatre suite’s in trauma: / withdrawn, and silent.
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True Cut 5
Rise and fall/ And rise. And fall/ Now slave to a rhythm/beyond her control/ Arms stretched wide/ in trusting surrender,/Chrissie waits…
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True Cut 4
Arms raised, face masked/Jo scrubs, gloves and gowns. Tries to prepare:/a sorcerer’s apprentice invoking powerful forces,/his body becoming, increasingly tense
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True Cut 3
Curled on her side,/cocooned in pain a/slick of cold sweat/on her ashen face,/Chrissie waits,/while, with/white coat and Janus /faced mask, Jo puts on/a compassionate/carapace.
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True Cut 2
To begin then, at the beginning,/with a team—of a sort./A surgeon, and apprentice/brilliantly lit,/like moths round a flame,/both teacher and taught/drawn to the wound,/ and the instruments’ glint.
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