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t m c p u l s e | m a r c h 2 02 0 27 Go further. Learn more at TWU.edu/houston TWU Nutrition Lab At the TWU Institute of Health Sciences – Houston Center, you can earn your graduate degree in nutrition, business, health care administration, nursing, or physical or occupational therapy. Get the support you need every step of the way. a necessary outlet to both patients and caregivers. The mission of the famed narra- tive medicine program at Columbia University, a mother to all others, is to "fortify clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness." Columbia offers a Master of Science in narrative medicine. In Houston, Baylor College of Medicine's narrative medicine program brings together faculty from diverse disciplines across the Texas Medical Center and hosts reading and writing events. 'It leaves an imprint' At Memorial Hermann Northeast, the journals have become a way for employees to reflect on their most difficult moments. The journalers agree that once you stand over death with a co-worker, something in your relationship changes. Those are the types of situations often captured in the journals. Nigliazzo and Graves created separate journal entries about the same poignant incident. "There was a situation where an infant had died," Nigliazzo began, "and when an infant dies in the hospital, the nurse wraps them in a blanket—completely covering everything—and carries that child to the morgue. They have a cart for adults, but for babies, they don't. The nurse carries them. I can never bring anyone else on my staff to do that, so I always do it. And every time I go, after I've taken a baby there, my arms always hurt, even though these babies weigh practically nothing. On that day, I took a picture of the morgue doors and made a note that my arms hurt. I also wrote down something the security guard said when she unlatched the morgue doors for me. She looked at me and said, "'It leaves an imprint.'" Graves was clerk that day. When Nigliazzo shared her jour- nal entry—a pencil drawing of the morgue doors and the quote from the security guard—Graves immediately recalled that baby, that day. And Nigliazzo's silence. "I remembered what Stacy looked like when she walked out of the room on the way to the morgue," Graves said. "She had no face. No expression." Graves drew a picture of her co-worker in her journal, holding the baby who was fully swaddled in a hospital blanket. In the sketch, Nigliazzo's face is almost blank. Graves wrote: "When the 'woman of words' has none." Nigliazzo hopes to expand narrative medicine at Memorial Hermann by launching a formal narrative practice curriculum within the nursing residency program. So many nurses, she said, struggle early on and even quit because of burnout. "I'm trying to get them at the beginning of their careers— to get them a wellness tool early," Nigliazzo said. "It helps with empathy, observation, to engender curiosity and appreciate ambiguity. We want nurses and other people to be curious about what's going on and to be comfortable asking questions." Honoring Shelley and Robert Schick with the Portrait of Compassion Award For sponsorships and tickets, visit sanjoseclinic.org/artwithheart or contact Dorcas Ross at dorcasross@sanjoseclinic.org or 713-490-2620. SAVE THE DATE Thursday, April 30, 2020 6:00p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Join His Eminence Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, STL, Honorary Event Chairs Shannon and Pat Mizell and Event Chairs Suzanne and Mark Clevenger for a night of art, jewelry, generosity and compassion at Art with Heart 2020. The Ballroom at Bayou Place • 560 Texas Ave. Houston, TX 77002 San Jose Clinic is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, a ministry of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, a Texas Medical Center member institution, and a United Way agency.