April 26, 2020
Though we are
Miles apart
We are still close
In our collective heart
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“How many people do you know that even though you haven't seen them in years, you pick up the phone talk as if it was yesterday? I think about this more now that many of us are in shelter-in-place. Now, more than ever, is a wonderful time to catch up. #coronavirus #covid19 🏞😊”
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