Counternarrative Poetry and Medicine

Physicians’ best medical advice for care does not always align with patients’ wishes. While many causes of this harmful and costly discordance are postulated, poor communication of shared goals tops many lists. In “Planning Our Escape,” poetry becomes a window into better understanding a patient’s refusal of treatment by offering a moving counternarrative to uncompromising medical advice. The speaker describes a friend with “thigh sarcoma” whose doctors “floated the idea of amputation,” after which he “floated up to visit” for a week spent outdoors instead. The implied clinical narrative of hospital confinement, surgery, and the resulting physical impairment is countered by the poem’s story of a lively friendship characterized by unfettered activity that clearly informs the “escape” of the poem’s title. That the speaker joins his friend in his escapist impulse, changing the friend’s habitual response to questions about his life from “planning my escape” to “planning our escape,” both shows respect for his friend’s autonomy and betrays a hint of his own contrarian wish to be free of medicine’s demands. Without ever explicitly endorsing his friend forgoing potentially lifesaving treatment, evident in the poem’s heart-wrenching conclusion is an openness to empathizing with him that could serve as a crucial basis for reconsideration. Poetry, in its capacity to embrace both the finality of the image of 2 friends searching for something lost (on another backpacking trip to Hiroshima, Japan) and the ironic hope of later sharing sake with “friends we made that night and never saw again,” beautifully engages the challenges of leaving against medical advice.