Poetry stereotypically elicits warm and comforting emotions, but sometimes it also provides a space for clinicians and patients alike to creatively grapple with more uncomfortable or unpleasant realities. The poem “Solo Climb” recounts several parallel stories, intertwining nature, illness, and extreme climbing within a wintry backdrop.
Two individuals face adversity in different ways, one snowbound within her home deciding whether to stop chemotherapy and the other (the patient’s friend) who climbs steep steps to reach her third-floor sickroom to care for her. Together they watch a movie about an alpinist scaling a cliff steadfast against the winter elements.
Poetry metaphorically likens their experiences, one as a patient and the other a caregiver. The reader feels both safely “perched” and dangerously “hanging” as they approach their respective precipices—yet their journeys, via the poem’s deft juxtapositions, ultimately become shared and equally fraught.
Anticipatory language and tenuously enjambed line breaks build throughout the poem, eliciting the foreboding sense that a fall is imminent.
JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) published a clinical update in Research Highlights on 24 Mar 2026.
The item focuses on Illness, Providing Care, and Poetry.
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