Etch a Sketch: A Young Patient’s Art Provides Imaginative Scaffolding

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology poem, “Etch a Sketch” by Dr. Wendy Tong, an Internal Medicine Resident at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. The poem is followed by an interview with Tong and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Tong shares her thought process behind her fictional poem, where a mother and daughter receive bad news of a leukemia diagnoses.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Etch a Sketch, by Wendy Tong, MD 

You are only seventeen when you first learn its meaning.
Just moments before, you sit in a white-walled room
with your mother by your side. You have been losing weight.
You have been feeling dizzy; you have been bedbound with colds.
You have been waking up with the taste of blood,
finding dried crimson on your pillow
and tiny red freckles smattering your skin. 

In the middle of the waiting your mind drifts back
to when you were younger, when the thing you liked best
to play with was an etch a sketch. You would maneuver the knobs
to draw lineographic pictures with an invisible stylus—a whole world of possibility pixelated into a gray two-dimensional screen.
If you made a mistake, no matter. The image would blur
with a few simple shakes; if no one saw it, did it ever really exist? 

When the doctor returns, you try to brace yourself but find
your defenses dissolving as he delivers the message. This is the moment you learn the meaning of tragedy. It is a fortune-telling, it is a sentence.
Your mother’s face pales. You simply stare at the hands in your lap—
hands that have just learned to love. Hands that have fumbled to make art; hands that could not help but hold onto hope. A whole world of possibility suddenly goes dark. If only this screen could be shaken, this gritty image erased.

As you watch your mother’s tears fall, you retreat to a safer place
inward, where you are free to sketch the image of the two of you
at the kitchen table just that morning, before things changed. 

In a single movement you pencil in the harsh slant
of your own angled cheekbone. In another, you etch worry lines
into your mother’s forehead for age to deepen.
This is not the future that she dreamed for you.

But there are things you cannot capture with two-dimensional strokes.
What of the way the sun had hit the glass saltshaker, or the slowing of light. The way refraction had scattered rainbow f