May 30, 2019
My presence
Is sometimes all I need
To mend the fence
To plant the seed
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“Just showing up for people you care about means so much. It tells them that they are not alone. 🌳😊”
Jenelle Jindal writes poems the way a physician works toward a diagnosis: through close attention to what presents itself. Her work uses the compressed lyric to examine the craft of medicine, asking how we describe, teach, and measure what resists easy instrumentation in care. At its deepest, that attention becomes presence, a quality both poetry and medicine demand but cannot fully teach. She studied biological sciences and linguistics at Stanford before training in medicine and neurology at Yale and at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Poet Doctor