February 23, 2019
Today’s a holiday
That’s right
Saw red and green
At the stoplight
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“We often wait to celebrate until there is a holiday or a specific reason to. But there is always a reason to do so! When will you next reflect and celebrate? 😊 🎉 #bepresent #staypresent”
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