Medicine and poetry mingle in the world of Peter Pereira

By Tyrone Beason
Seattle Times staff reporter

	DEAN RUTZ / THE SEATTLE TIMES Physician and poet Peter Pereira meets with a young patient in the hallway of the High Point Medical Clinic in West Seattle.
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Related stories Poetry by Peter Pereira, M.D.

Dr. Peter Pereira dispenses a kind of down-home medicine to the immigrants and seniors who come to see him in the cramped, remodeled apartment building that is High Point Medical Clinic in West Seattle.

He treats his patients like storytellers, tilting his slender frame toward them and nodding with understanding as they narrate tales of weak hips, congested lungs, sour stomachs and lonely hearts.

In turn, they help him give imagery, voice and meaning to the human condition through his other passion, poetry.

Pain and illness can be so abstract. Their roots can be physical, emotional or both. Pereira's job is to make suffering concrete, while treating it with a deft touch.

These skills also serve him in two volumes of poetry, "The Lost Twin" published in 2000, and "Saying the World," published this month by Copper Canyon Press.

The doctor's poems Peter Pereira, M.D., has two volumes of verse, "The Lost Twin" (Grey Spider Press, 2000) and most recently, "Saying the World" (Copper Canyon Press, $14). Read his poetry.

"Writing poems for me is a way to contain all that wild, crazy energy from the practice. To hold it out in space, work it from all angles," Pereira explained. "On the other side, when you're burned out and fried, writing poems is a way to access your feelings again."

Medical schools increasingly are offering classes that incorporate poetry, short stories and memoirs in hopes of teaching pre-med students and residents how to truly "see" and connect with patients, how to read sickness in human as well as scientific terms.

"What is Lost," Pereira's poem about a Cambodian immigrant patient who fled the Khmer Rouge, is cited in medical-school humanities courses around the country for first- and second-year medical students.

He recently won Copper Canyon's Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets. The judges praised his "ability to be a doctor and poet simultaneously, and to make it all so simply, deeply and translucently human that the poems seem inevitable."

An elective course at the University of Washington Medical School titled "The Human Face of Medicine" employs the works of doctor-playwright Anton Chekhov and doctor-poet William Carlos Williams.

Denise Dudzinski, an assistant professor of medical history and ethics at the UW School of Medicine, says the marriage of literature and medicine makes perfect sense.

"It taps into the emotional realm of medicine and to the notion of medicine as an art," she said.

By engaging in discussions about the crossover powers of the written word and the healing hand, Dudzinski said, medical schools can prod students to reflect more deeply on their career and true purpose in pursuing it.

Nurturer of words, wounds

Pereira, who has worked at High Point for 12 years, doesn't consider himself in the vanguard of a phenomenon. With bachelor's degrees in English and pre-medicine at the University of Washington — where he also received his medical doctorate — he has been forging a bond between the two disciplines his whole career.

Through listening and the written word, he evokes empathy. From medicine, he evokes authority. "The most healing there is is when a patient feels that they were heard," Pereira said.

Even when the patient speaks no English, Pereira's body language — a handshake, a gentle squeeze on the knee or a pat on the back — conveys familiarity and interest. As poet and doctor, Pereira must be eager to peek beneath scarred surfaces and see the possibility for normalcy and commonality.

"You really sort of have to love all the warts and ugly things you see every day, or you'll be miserable," Pereira said from his home in Seattle's Mount Baker neighborhood, where he spends Tuesdays and Thursdays writing. "I love all the problems people have — and working with them to address those problems.

"People are going to be coming at you from every direction" with every kind of concern or physical complaint," he said. Writing poetry "keeps you from getting emotionally shut down and numbed. It reminds you of the primacy of the individual in human life."

So when Pereira sees patients at the clinic, little else seems to matter, not even poetry.

"When I'm with a patient, I'm with them totally and completely," he said. "The poems come on my day off."

As with the poem about the Cambodian woman, Pereira sometimes draws from his experiences in the exam room to shape new poems, changing names and altering facts to preserve his patients' confidentiality. "They come from work, but it happens later, and sometimes years later," he said of his medical poems.

In the poem "Her Name is Rose," Pereira explores the empathy he felt for a patient who had a boil drained:

"And I'm not quite sure, driving home/ later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus,/ whether it's merely hallucination, the way/ her memory inhabits me; or if being/ in that same room, inhaling that same air, made some of her/ part of me."

The UW's Dudzinski describes creative writing as a way to flesh out the ambiguity, uncertainty and grief many doctors feel in the exam room but cannot reveal.

Doctors have to be insightful, decisive, firm and most important, right.

As rewarding as the experience may be, it can be exhausting.

"You're putting yourself into this stronger self, so you can help the person," Pereira said.

Writing can serve as an outlet for the all that bottled-up emotion.

"It's an external medium where all of those feelings can be placed and be safe," Dudzinski said.

Healing touch

Co-workers and literary colleagues say Pereira possesses a generosity of spirit, intellect and time. But he's also intensely focused.

"He's efficient and direct — no beating around the bush with him," said Renecia Dickson, the clinic coordinator at High Point. "He's the only provider I know who walks downstairs and says, 'Is there anybody I can see?' He's always willing to lend a helping hand, whether it's his patient or not."

"He's a very gentle person — very observant, very compassionate," said Dr. Ted McMahon, a physician at Ballard Pediatric and a fellow poet who has participated in writers groups with Pereira and worked as an editor for Floating Bridge Press, which Pereira and some other writers started in 1995.

"I think he is able to put himself aside with his patients. And he has a terrific sense of humor."

All of these qualities show up in Pereira's writing. Present is the emotional distance of a casual observer and the devotion to detail of someone there to bear witness.

The writing gene

Maybe Pereira's skill with words was passed down by his parents.

Pereira's father was serving in the British Navy in Hong Kong after World War II when an American soldier told him about a sister he had back home in Walla Walla. The young pair exchanged letters and photographs for two or three years and got engaged, without ever meeting face-to-face, Pereira said.

"There's probably some writing gene that they both had," he mused, half-jokingly. "I thought it was amazing to be in love with someone you've never even kissed," he said.

His parents eventually met, of course, got married and had 10 children.

Pereira continues the family tradition of exploring human bonds through language.

"Saying the World" includes not just poems inspired by the practice of medicine but verse that plumbs his life as a gay man with a partner and the loss of loved ones, including the death of a younger sister when he was 10.

Writing some of these poems helped Pereira close his own wounds, he said.

As he writes in a poem titled, "Nosophilia/love of affliction ":

"Shinsplint. Bowleg. Backache. Rupture/ What pains us makes us us."

As Pereira's poetry and medical practice prove, what heals us makes us who we are, too.

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company