March 30, 2019
To have more time
My only wish
Goodbye good luck
Mr. Fish
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“My betta fish that I adopted a year ago just died yesterday. I named him corona radiata: his fins reminded me of the nerve fibers in the brain with that name. Sad to see him go but enjoy the time we had together 🐠🌞”
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