The 2021 Temple Story Slam on March 3 was unlike any of the seven that preceded it. One by one, a dozen presenters shared their stories while facing a webcam rather than a packed auditorium in the Medical Education and Research Building.
Michael Vitez, Director of Narrative Medicine at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (LKSOM), quipped that they were “Story Slam Zoom pioneers.”
With the virtual format, there was no sense in the moment of how many were watching. And the only indication of how their stories were received was in the comments and clapping hand emojis that flooded the chat bar.
And yet, the humor and gravity that have resonated during and after each prior Story Slam was still there. If anything, the intimacy of this edition, with the viewer having the storyteller all to themselves, may have even boosted the emotional volume.
The return of a few Story Slam veterans also helped lend an air of familiarity to the evening. Most notable among them was Katya Ahr, a fourth-year medical student, who was voted the night’s winner by the audience. Ahr won the fall 2017 Story Slam.
On this occasion, she shared an untitled spoken-word poem that she said was inspired by her recent residency interviews. With a meticulously measured cadence, Ahr described her improbable ascent from a poor, small-town existence.
“Tell me about yourself. It's a question I've been asked 17 times in the last four months and it always throws me for a minute. Where do I begin?
“My name is Katya. I grew up in upstate New York in a small flat downstairs from my grandparents. It was an old factory town where everybody gets cancer. I grew up thinking I'd never get to go to college, but here I am.
“My name is Katya. I've been a lot of things, and now I'd like to be a doctor, an oncologist, specifically. You see, because everyone I grew up with seems to get cancer, and maybe it could be from that brightly colored creek.”
A few of the storytellers described interactions with patients who they’d later come to regard as a tether that pulled them back from an emotional brink.
“I’m not sure why the patient stood out. Maybe my identity as a healer had been tarnished by COVID. Maybe my heart couldn’t take another death. Maybe I, like so many families, was looking for a miracle,” said Temple hospitalist Sister Jocelyn Edathil, MD, PhD, of her reaction to a young patient who coded for 15 minutes but pulled through. Dr. Edathil saw her recovery as a miracle, which helped her reclaim hope.
“My gift of healing was shocked back into practice,” she said.
Fourth-year medical student Erin McGillivray shared a story about a patient she encountered during her surgical rotation. The patient had a reputation for being difficult, but ultimately taught McGillivray the value of slowing down, listening and being present.
“I saw her in a totally different light after learning about her life and having context for everything going on with her health,” McGillivray. “After a few weeks, she was ready to be discharged, and the team wanted me to break the happy news to her. I told her that her infection had healed and she could go home after that afternoon. To my surprise, she started to cry. ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. It was sobering to experience.”
But not every account was about redemption or a personal course correction. Jenny Schadt, a third-year medical student, pushed back against the notion of the heroic healthcare provider.
A large poster that was plastered on a boarded-up rowhome across the street from her home at the height of the pandemic in Philadelphia became a grating reminder of the schism between public perception and her own reality. In an image superimposed over the American flag, a nurse cares for a patient. The caption read, “If I fail, he dies.”
“The burden has been placed in our hands, and, sometimes it feels, our hands alone,” Schadt said. “I am tired of healthcare workers having to be heroes. We are not superheroes. And asking us to be is setting us up for failure.
“I have to remind myself that as healthcare workers, we did not fail our country,” she said. “In some ways, the country failed us.”
Schadt and pulmonologist Erin Camac, DO, FCCP, were voted co-runners-up.
Dr. Camac was just as blunt as Schadt. She bypassed the story she’d written for a heartfelt, almost stream-of-consciousness testimonial about the toll the pandemic had taken on her.
Suddenly, Dr. Camac said, she found herself isolated with an orthopedic nurse performing CPR on a patient who was discharged from the COVID-19 intensive care unit only 45 minutes earlier.
“We did it for a very long time,” she said.
When Dr. Camac finally called his death, she collapsed on the floor, exhausted, covered in sweat, her glasses fogged up, her N95 mask digging into her face.
“I was just collecting myself. And a fellow appeared to check on me because I hadn’t answered my phone,” she said. “He said, ‘Did you see what’s going on in Harrisburg?’”
He showed her images of mask-less protestors at the capitol complex last spring.
“I had a very difficult day after that,” Dr. Camac said. “It was hard for me to maintain focus. It was hard for me to talk to other people when I realized the way this was going to go and how it was going to be.
Dr. Camac then moved to the present, where so many of her chronic patients, after being so careful for a year, isolating, are beginning to let down their guard, and paying an ultimate price.
“The experience that I'm having now,” she said, “is watching the patients that I care for in the outpatient room, people with interstitial lung disease, who are so incredibly fragile, receiving their COVID diagnoses and lighting up my inbox with positive results because it seems safer, because the numbers are down, because the vaccine is rolling out.
“And so, I am still holding on in the same way that I was when I was sitting on the floor after performing CPR for 45 minutes, looking at the pictures of the protesters on the front steps of the capitol in Harrisburg.”
Each of the presenters had five minutes to share a story.
“The purpose of the Story Slam is to come together and focus on the human side of medicine, to pause from our busy lives and appreciate what we do, the challenges we face, the humanity of caring for patients,” Vitez said.