May 2021. Recovery.

We started planning this edition of Auxocardia well before the weather turned warm, and the sun began to shine again. We started talking about May during winter, in a time where we couldn’t believe May was quite so far and quite so close.

This time, right now, feels similar. We’ve talked about seeing friends and family. We’ve imagined what we would do when vaccinated. We somehow are capable of recalling life before face masks and yet, at the same time, it feels as if it’s always been this way.

We talked about recovery in many senses of the word; we thought about a world trying to recover from a pandemic. We considered those exhausted frontline workers; in the hospital and on the street, fighting for social justice after a brutal, difficult year. We reflected on the national and global discourse; our politics, divisions and climate. 

I thought, personally, about my own experience these last few months. I’ve struggled. Maybe you have too. With illness, with fear, with a sense that everything around me was collapsing in a way I couldn’t quite comprehend.

So what does it mean to recover? What could recovery mean to you?

The artists this month ask us to expand our understanding of recovery. To imagine, and recognize, that it is not a linear process. It is not a state of arrival, but an active struggle. A verb. A fight. They ask us to confront the unpleasant fact, that often, to move forward, you must travel backward. Ellie Lorenzana asks us to consider this in the care of an infant in the NICU. Mallika Khan pushes us to consider what it takes to break away from cultural and societal norms, and come away seeking something better and truer for ourselves. Caitlin Irish asks us to do better, as caregivers, as healers, as humans, in her piece The Vatican in Disguise. 

This process is never not complicated; this act we call recovery.

In Quo Vadis, Anna Idelevich asks us, quite literally, where we are going.

If you’re like me, maybe that’s too big a question to answer right now. After all; there is a duality to recovery. Katarina Alajbegović engages with the push and pull of progress and regression as she confronts both the pain and joy of a pandemic. In our collaboration this month, we feature the project lead of a new curriculum designed to teach coping with death and grief in clinical education. Erin Currey’s reflection, and the accompanying narrative medicine piece and illustration, give us a sense of what it is to move through grief and recover; never as you were before, but whole nonetheless. 

Because as Charis Chen reminds us: Caged birds sing still. Perhaps not the way we think they might, but sing they do. Which leads us to wonder if they can really be called caged at all. 

Importantly, our artists also remind us to take time to care for ourselves in the midst of an uncertain time. Take a moment (or 5 blissful minutes) to listen to Kevin Schneider sing. You’ll feel better.  In the words of John Denver, we’re all “seeking grace in every step [we] take.”

Ruslana Cannell’s Nurture reminds us of the potential for wholeness, recovery, and rebirth. 

We want to thank you for supporting Auxocardia. Please consider following us on social media, or reaching out to learn more about ways you can support the project. Be sure to read to the end of Erin Currey’s reflection for ways you can participate in Coping with Crisis on the Wards; this includes sharing your story and entering a contest for her textbook’s cover art. 

We are so grateful to our guest editors this month, the recent graduates and champions of the arts in medicine, Gavisha Waidyaratne and Sangri Kim, for their input and guidance in creating this issue. They have a welcome to this issue for you too. Please; read and be inspired here.

We’ve also welcomed the incredible Marvin Urias to our team. It’s only been a few weeks, but he’s consulting, creating, and making us better, in every way. 

If your year has been anything like mine, it has been full of challenges and surprises. It has been full of unexpected outcomes and changed plans. 

For a while, I wondered if maybe I was breaking. Maybe you did too.

But I’ve discovered something true, in this challenging time. It’s slow and it’s painful.  But the breaking gives you a chance to rebuild.

At least, it has for me. 

Take care & be well.

-molly