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t m c n e w s . o r g 24 The Narrative Practice Project A young man with a gunshot wound to the face walked himself into the emergency room at Memorial Hermann Northeast Hospital. The injury, which had shredded the tissue on one side of his jaw, left him unable to talk. But his eyes spoke volumes. "He looked like he had costume makeup on—it was straight out of a movie," said emergency department unit clerk Brittany Graves, who registers walk-ins, coordinates EMS traffic and initiates transfers. "He couldn't say a word, but his eyes said, 'Please, help me.'" Emergency physicians did, indeed, help the young man, who survived his wound. But Graves couldn't shake his expression and ghastly pallor. First chance she got, she drew a picture of him in her journal, pasting a printout of the four rules of firearm safety on the opposite page. "I like my journal entries to feel like a completed art piece," Graves said. Graves and other emergency department (ED) employees at Memorial Hermann Northeast are part of a narrative practice project launched by Stacy Nigliazzo, a nurse and poet whose most recent poetry collection, Sky the Oar, was published by Press 53. "The emergency department is intense and fast-paced. You're seeing people, a lot of times, on the worst day of their life," said Nigliazzo, clinical coordinator of emer- gency services at the hospital. "I know what that does to me, how when I go home I carry it with me. Emergency department staffers at Memorial Hermann Northeast Hospital are keeping personal journals Writing and art have always been my outlet, especially creative writing. And I see my staff get burned out; I see them suffering from compassion fatigue." Research shows that arts and humanities are essential to a robust medical education, because both disciplines encourage compassion and empathy, traits often lost within the crush and churn of medical care. Nigliazzo shared some of this research with her chief nursing officer, who gave her permission to launch an arts task force at the hospital. After a few individual projects, Nigliazzo passed out blank journals to staff members who expressed an interest. "A journal entry can be one word," she said. "It can be a picture. It can be a sketch. It can be something you cut out and pasted in. It's intended to be something so you can remember what was important to you on this day—what you've endured, what you've earned." Cultivating empathy Because the journals are whatever their owners want them to be, they can be wildly variable, from person to person and even from entry to entry within the same journal. "I'm a reluctant journaler, so mine is not a daily thing," said Lesa Thornton, an ED pharmacist at the hospital. "Over Christmas, I drew the symbol for a handicapped sign in my journal. I was arguing with my hus- band's best friend, who had a massive stroke in September. ➟ B y M a g g i e G a l e h o u s e