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| Weight | .6 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × 9 in |
But I Still Have My Fingerprints
Dianne Silvestri, MD$18.00
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Delivered a 10% prognosis for survival, Dr. Dianne Silvestri surrenders her white coat for a hospital gown and a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. Aided by her attentive medical team, family, and friends, she navigates the surreal world of chemotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and subsequent threats from graft vs. host disease and serious infections from weakened immunity. With a clear eye for irony and analogy and a commitment to curiosity and truth, Silvestri writes through her struggles and victories. She gives us poems with unique perspectives, fresh images, and unquenchable optimism in her perseverance to redefine life beyond what was lost.
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Meet the Author
Dianne Silvestri, MD is a graduate of Butler University and Indiana University School of Medicine. She was associate professor of dermatology at UMass Chan Medical School until leukemia forced her retirement. She has studied poetry at workshops including Tupelo, PoemWorks, and Colrain, and authored the chapbook Necessary Sentiments. Her poems have appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, Barrow Street, The Main Street Rag, and Naugatuck River Review, among others. She is a past Pushcart Prize nominee, and cofounder and leader of the Morse Poetry Group in Massachusetts. The mother of four and grandmother of seven, she enjoys gardening and ballroom dancing with her husband. www.diannesilvestri.com
Critic Reviews
Dianne Silvestri’s fine lyric poems are written with the clear vision of the physician who herself becomes the patient with a serious illness (“beached / my white coat / surrendered”). She travels with honesty and courage her “long / essential diversion” from the everyday of her life. There is the night phone call with bad news (“I endure for the verdict at dawn”), followed by the complicated journey through pain, treatments, fears, losses, consolations, leading to a “first-ditch list” of hopes. An inspiring, merciful, beautifully written collection.
—Ann Taylor, author of Sortings
Dianne Silvestri is known for her diagnostic savvy, therapeutic smarts, and compassion. In this book, she triumphs, not only with a survivor’s pluck, but with tantalizing juxtapositions: word to word, sentence to sentence, idea to idea.
—Jeffrey D. Bernhard, MD, FRCP (Edin), Professor Emeritus, UMass Chan Medical School
Some things must be experienced to be fully understood. Love. A perfectly ripe slice of watermelon on a summer day. Cancer and a stem cell transplant. Dianne Silvestri beautifully opens the door into this reality. Fellow transplant survivors like me will feel a deep camaraderie with her as she speaks of her experience.
At times stark and even dark, her poems express the shock of diagnosis and the ravages of treatment. The final line in “Daunorubicin”—“Oh crimson savage, leave me alive!”—took me back to those torturous days of neverending nausea. And yet, these poems are often funny and full of hope. Silvestri introduces us to her IV pole, George, and forgives this new friend when he nips at her ankles. With words real and raw, she lays bare the fear of not surviving, the struggles of new life in survival, and the joys of reclaiming mundane tasks like grocery shopping. Her question to her donor in “Dear Healthy 28-Year-Old Man” brought me to my knees: “Whoever you are, will your sacrifice be worthwhile?”
People often ask me how I got through three fights with stage 4 blood cancer, saying they don’t think they could do it. This collection of poems lights the way through.
—Dianne Callahan, motivational speaker and author of Lighthearted Life and the forthcoming Journey through Illness
Excerpts
The Night Phlebotomist
The corridors seethe with nocturnal predators,
their voices low.
My door latch coughs, a figure hisses,
I’ve come to draw blood,
wrenches my arm like a lamb shank,
rasps it with alcohol, plunges her spike,
pops one color-coded, rubber-stoppered
vial after another into the sheath,
unplugs each loaded one to add
to the crimson log pile weighting my thigh,
steals more, it seems, than ought to be ample
from this provisional liquor of my life.
from “You May Resume Your Normal Activities”
I must hide these mulberry stains,
this shearable, translucent skin
(tissue-thin, plum cushion, battered twin),
my inner space flash-fry or cry mode,
but worst, my replaced face
(unknown phase, fallout trace, sheer disgrace),
from cortisone blown wide
to a visage I don’t recognize
(rude disguise, unsought prize, close your eyes) . . .
Awaiting Reconstitution
I am now my proxy,
a mirage of me
swirling with sap
of a different DNA,
my vacant marrow
waiting for adopted
cells to populate,
maybe tomorrow,
while I pray for a truce
between genomes
who quarrel like siblings.
Rescued, yes,
but confined, too strained
to name it repose,
more like perpetually
renewed postponement,
endless intermission,
my life
locked out.
Product Details
But I Still Have My Fingerprints
96 pages
Dianne Silvestri, MD
Pub date – November 2022
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-94-5
Emerging Voices – Poetry
Barbara J Mayfield, MS, RDN, LD, FAND, Editor, Communicating Nutrition: The Authoritative Guide –
But I Still Have My Fingerprints, by Dianne Silvestri, MD, is a poignant collection of poems that opens the reader to the heart of a doctor become patient. There is nothing more powerful in a healthcare professional’s skillset than empathy, and nothing creates empathy like experience. Next best is experience shared. Poetry is an art form that expresses emotions like no other and in these poems, Silvestri shares her fear, pain, uncertainty, hope, and desire. We can feel it. Empathy is born. This book should be required reading for students aspiring to work with patients. It is also appropriate for anyone going through serious medical treatment and their loved ones. The foreword and the glossary provide valuable explanations of the terminology and treatment adding understanding to empathy.
Linda Anderson –
I started reading through these poems and felt compelled to read on until I had read them all. Twice. And then Emily Dickinson came to mind: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body feel so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry.”
The images in these poems are vivid, raw, stark. As the poet invites us along on her journey from the first diagnosis of leukemia through exhausting chemotherapy to rigorous preparation and execution of a stem cell transplant followed by graft host disease and other complications, I found myself feeling cold, exposed, spent. And also—eventually– grateful, hopeful, poignantly moved by potential loss and sustaining love.
I felt the cold floor as she cried out to God, “The floor is too cold/too hard to kneel/but hear me/God. Hold me.” (Chemotherapy) and later begged for approved shoes to wear over the standard issue gripper sox (Isolation Room, Leukemia Floor.) I felt exposed as Dr. Silvestri, once the physician now the patient, remembering her own student stethoscope, was examined by medical students and struggled with her X-Large blue gown feeling “naked in a snow globe.” (Doctor as Patient)
This poet is a truth-teller. She faces the harsh realities of her life unflinchingly. Watching one of the chemotherapies coursing through the tube into her veins, she pleads, “O crimson savage/leave me alive.” (Daunorubicin) As she is beginning preparation for the transplant, she notes that the doctor is “wearing grave hope,” and she describe one of the drugs as designed to “disarm all resistance/not already drained by my terror.” (Countdown to New Birthday)
But this journey is also infused with humor, gratitude, and tender love. She names her IV Pole “George.” She observes “jurassic progress” going on in a parking garage across from her window as a raptor excavator eyes her as his potential dessert. She describes hospital life with the corridors seething with “nocturnal predators.” (The Night Phlebotomist) She muses with deep gratitude about her donor (Dear Healthy 28-yr-old Man.) And there are poignant moments with her husband threaded throughout, notably as he helps her choose a head covering and she sees his smile as she awakens after days of drugged sleep post transplant. Her “Conversation with My Grandson” is memorable. And one of the lines most embedded in my heart is from Advance Directive. After reminding her husband that she would never choose to leave him alone, she runs through some just-in-case instructions (to change her voice on the answering machine, take the cooking class he’s always wanted to take,) and there’s this: “and if your resume dancing lessons/pretend it is I waltzing with you.”
There is a universality about these poems that resonates with all of us, stem cell donors or recipients or not. And so much more depth and complexity than my prose can describe. I am reminded of Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” Dr. Silvestri has captured that truth, with both terrible and beautiful things woven together in her poetry.
Letty Wheelock –
I am a nurse practitioner who shared my husband’s bone marrow treatment experience as his caregiver, friend and lover. On my first reading of this book, when I reached the poem “Dear Healthy 28 Year Old Man” I crumbled, thinking how forever grateful I am to my husband’s sister, who was a perfect match and saved him.
This book affected me profoundly. Every poem moved me, some of them brought tears. I love the style of Silvestri’s writing. Poems are written with limited words, packed full of meaning and arranged beautifully on the page. Her heartfelt descriptions kept me feeling as if I were sharing her most personal and intimate feelings and experiences.
“But I Still Have My Fingerprints” is a beautifully arranged collection of poems written by Dianne Silvestri, MD. The poems describe her experiences during her stem cell transplant. The book will speak to those patients and their loved ones who are are facing similar treatments for similar cancers. I also recommend this compilation for all medical providers working in the transplant realm as it will enhance their understanding of the process and the care needed by these critically ill patients .
Dori Rhodes –
As I read, But I Still Have My Fingerprints, I felt as if I had fallen into Alice’s rabbit hole wherein I discovered the daily conundrums and paradoxical realities of one living with cancer. Dr. Silvestri’s insatiable pursuit to create poetry from dire situations, to find humor and pleasure, and to seek purpose and meaning amidst the madness of fighting against the odds, is inspiring. Her revelations of gratitude concurrent with grief, and her intimate conversations with God, spouse, and grandchild embolden us to put words to our deepest thoughts and longings about our own desires, fears and mortality with those we love.
Dianne Silvestri is a beautiful writer of poetry in which we are given a window into her world battling cancer, stem cell transplant, and then host vs. graft disease and life thereafter maintaining health.
Gratitude, humor, faith, determination, tenacity, and courage are the companions she befriends to navigate this road with dignity and grace. I found strength, hope, and insight for living and have profound respect that one could write so beautifully and produce such a gift to others in the midst of trying days. Dori Rhodes, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Stan Hanover –
“But I Still Have My Fingerprints” is about a woman who has deftly handled variables of all kinds in her life as a successful physician and mother of four, suddenly finding herself in the emotional grip of life-threatening cancer dealing with a situation more dire than she has ever encountered. Silvestri’s haunting collection chronicles a five year plus struggle not only to survive the horrible possibilities of her diagnosis, but to survive as a person in a world that regularly identifies her by her condition as if cancer were her only substance as a person.
As difficult as it was for her to physically endure brutal ongoing therapies like chemo to ward off the cancer, the struggle to “show I am me” was in its own way as trying and frustrating and protracted as the cancer itself because as much as she tried to govern herself, she too at times kept reflexively thinking “Cancer” when she thought about herself.
She found it especially difficult to avoid her own complicity, when after an accumulation of chemo treatments, the body she presented to the world was “a scarecrow freak show” of “translucent skin;” “ostrich legs;” a puffy “moon face;” and overall “an alien visage of sour hue, drumstick clavicles, [and] radiator ribs [that looked like her] Anatomy cadaver.”
Although being seen for who she really is may not have been as pressing a goal as combating cancer as at first blush many of the poems might imply, Silvestri’s specific choice of the title makes clear that despite all the visibly degrading hard to bear physical horrors of her cancer, the standout theme of the book in her own estimation (as her victory lap in the title suggests), was the importance she placed on confirming her own identity and restoring the integrity of her personhood.
It’s the reader’s considerable good fortune that such a remarkably courageous woman and equally talented poet was so determined to write, mold, and bravely share this very special collection. Her dogged unstoppable optimism and resolve to re-socialize herself has gifted us an unsparingly intimate life-affirming story, eloquent in both language and feeling from beginning to end.
Witnessing her homeward journey is an absolute must-read.