Volume 28

September - 2021

Cover: It’s all a Mirage

I began painting this piece for my brother while I was applying to residency last year. He is a huge foodie, avid longboarder, and probably my biggest art fan. When I found out that I didn’t match into a residency program, I lost my inspiration to paint. It wasn’t until I came back from my sub-internship in Utah last month that I felt my typical creative spirit again. Finishing this piece signified finding myself after overcoming a professional failure and working hard to come out of it a stronger person and student. Art has often played a cathartic role in my life, providing an outlet during difficult times. This skateboard is currently on its way to my unknowing brother as a thank you gift for being there for me through these trying months.

Acrylic on skateboard wood panel

Letter from the Editors:

Welcome to Art of Emergency Medicine, an online blog featuring amazing works of art created by your Emergency Medicine colleagues, along with their own stories of wellness and inspiration. In addition to sharing their art, we also try to include how we are focusing on wellness each month.

This month, we’re going to focus on something we may have lost in the last few months as the pandemic continues to surge forward: Empathy. 

Empathy is crucial in our practice. It allows us to connect with our patients and establish common ground often leading to better adherence to treatments and improved outcomes, decreases malpractice lawsuits, and improves emotional health with reduced burnout. Empathy can be taught and refined in healthcare professionals, but why do we lose it?

Well, working increased hours with greater workload, reduced time with patients, and understaffing doesn’t help. Sound familiar? All of these have been magnified during our time in COVID and unfortunately, are often not factors that we have control over.

So what can we do to retrain our empathy?

• Be Genuinely Curious

  • Ask your patients how their symptoms have been affecting their life and try to imagine how they may impact your own. Beyond that, ask what they are most worried about. How may it be affecting their mood and relationships? How can you best intervene?

• Practice Active Listening

  • Sit down with patients during the patient interview, make eye contact with them, and pick up on their non-verbal cues during their answers. Respond with their points or indicate that you’ve noticed a change in behavior. They may be encouraged to share additional information, and if not may be more likely to adhere to your recommendations. Most importantly, be patient, listen and process before interrupting with your next question.

• Normalize Advocacy

  • Make helping and fighting for others your routine. Attempt to figure out what specific needs a patient may have whether that be utilizing an interpreter for their native language, asking their preferred pronouns, what accommodations may they require moving forward, or preemptively prepare work/school notes. Most importantly work to ensure understanding and describe what is going on such that they may understand it and self-advocate.

Practicing empathy takes work, which in the face of physician and nursing shortages, endless EMS calls, and increased documentation seems like it may be a Herculean task. It may not happen all at once, but by starting to incorporate small pieces into patient encounters, we may retrain our empathy and begin to advocate for systematic empathy as well.

Babushka

This painting is based on a photo of my grandma and me in Bodega Bay. The process of painting this snapshot of simpler times while coping with her passing early in the pandemic brought back happy memories and allowed me to reflect on the impact she had on me. I came full circle and made a trip back out to Bodega Bay to take this photo of the painting.

Acrylic on canvas

Crashing

It reminds me of crashing waves on a beach. It's calming and chaotic at the same time, like the ED, like residency, like life. It helps with burnout which is at its peak during this next Covid wave.

Waimea Valley Pathway

I wanted to create an image similar in style to that of Peter Lik. Photography allows me to get lost in the process of capturing and creating art. It completely relaxes me.

A combination of HDR and blending modes were used to create this image.

Portrait of a DUCK

With so much stress around in life and in the emergency department right now, I’ve looked to find escapes through my photography and editing process. Realizing not everything needs to be masterpieces or stunning landscapes. Some projects can simply be focused on bringing a small smile to your face. By presenting the duck in the most serious style of Renaissance era portraits, I hope it evokes humor and brings a smile to the viewers face.

Digital photography, edited in lightroom/photoshop

Do you want to see your art shared with the community? Don’t forget to submit today!

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This Months Featured Artists:

Diana Trumble, MD

I've been crocheting for over 20 years. In medical school, I starting selling some items and doing more than just your typical grandmother's crochet. Now I focus on the repetition of the patterns and creating beauty from a ball of yarn in the midst of residency in a pandemic. Find more of her work on Instagram.

Edward, MD

I am a board certified EM physician working at the North Chicago VA and in Wisconsin. Before pursuing medicine, I worked as a photographer for the military. Photography is my outlet. I still shoot film and can spend hours in my darkroom. Discover more of his photography on Instagram.

Harrison McUmber

I am a fourth year medical student at Tufts University School of Medicine and I will be applying to emergency medicine residency programs this September. I started drawing and painting at a young age. My father is an artist and we would spend hours drawing together and critiquing each other’s work. When I’m not drawing or studying, I spend my time mountain biking, snowboarding, and reading. One of the many things I love about the emergency medicine community is how it promotes the curiosity and diverse interests in all of us.

Marina Zakharevich

Marina Zakharevich is a fourth-year medical student originally from California. She distinctly remembers the moment she started taking drawing seriously as a little child: she was told that her unicorn drawing was anatomically incorrect, so she got a book of horse photos and began meticulously copying them for days on end. She has enjoyed drawing and painting ever since.

Jonathan Warren, MD

A PGY-2 at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and founder of Art of Emergency Medicine. His hobbies include photography, hiking, Netflix, and dogs. He’s always on the lookout for the next adventure. Find more of his photography on Instagram.

You can learn more about the artists featured in this and other volumes at our contributors page!