February 18, 2019
We do not know
When or how
We leave this earth
We just have now
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“Spending time with my grandmother in her last weeks, this became very clear. How often do you find yourself ruminating on the past, or planning the future but not truly experiencing the Now?⌛”
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