How poetry taught me to be patient with the history of others and my own

The writer, a junior doctor, discovered the healing nature of writing poetry when she had to cope with her mother's cancer diagnosis.

- Tricia Tan

They came one after another on WhatsApp, an ugly train of images from my mother's colonoscopy.

My feet stilled in the hospital hallway.

Then her text: "M so sad, tumour so ugly. Prof says must op. What next?"

It was 2020, I was one week into my third year of medical school, and fresh into the world of hospital wards and real patients. But nothing could have prepared me and my family for the diagnosis: rectal cancer, stage 2.

Once an active woman who bumbled about pasar malam and cafes to meet her friends, my mother spent most of the day confined at home. A little plastic bag now lived on her tummy, where a stoma, a soft red crater where her intestines opened from, spewed gunky green fluid several times a day.

Cancer clobbered her mental health. The air hung heavy in our home. Some days, there would be tears, and wailing like I had never heard before.

My third year of medical school was largely spent shuttling between hospitals—the one where I was sent to as part of my clinical postings, and the one where my mum was warded.

While I could keep it together enough to comfort my mother, my own mental health took a nosedive. I would experience unpleasant flashbacks whenever I attended tutorials and cancer was discussed. We were also in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, so in-person social meet-ups and church, once a safe place for me to decompress, were no longer possible.

I found it difficult to concentrate when studying at home, or when visiting my mum.

At night, I often lay wide-eyed on my bed, anxieties racing through my mind: What if the cancer returns? Will she ever recover fully? Should I study or stay longer to visit her in the hospital?

That was when I turned to the solace of words to make meaning of what I was experiencing.

MAKING MEANING