Healthcare is Human is a recurring SoMeDocs series featuring stories by Renee K. Nicholson and Ryan McCarthy, MD, accompanied by photography by Molly Humphreys.
Surprises, by their very nature, come at unlikely times, or from unlikely places. Sometimes both.
When you approach the Berkeley Medical Center (BMC) in Martinsburg, West Virginia, you are greeted by a sturdy building with “WVU Medicine” branding displayed prominently in front of the red bricks, an expected healthcare context. A busy parking lot, one cramped by active construction, is full of patients and families entering and exiting, holding hands as they avoid cones and piles of gravel. Employees, in a rainbow assortment of scrubs, do the same with quicker gaits and lunchboxes in hand. Until you look closer, this could be a hospital in Anytown, USA.
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In the springtime, leafy trees and Crayola-colored flowers bloom in patches of earth that historically grew apple trees. In summer, waves of dizzying humid heat radiate off the asphalt, the kind that can melt your car radio. The harsh sun shines over the Shenandoah Valley and, when combined with the drenching rains of climate change, creates a lush landscape of biting bugs and emerald green grass. When fall finally brings sweet relief, high school football and marching bands accompany cool nights and the harvest palette of orange pumpkins and ruby red apples. A cold, gray winter completes this biological calendar, marking another trip around the sun. This march of seasons keeps time.
In the spring of 2020, that rhythm was disrupted by the arrival of Covid-19, a novel and frightening infection for which there was no countermeasure. The staff of BMC braced for impact as tulips and daffodils raised their sunny faces from the cold mud. As the pandemic made itself an unwelcome guest in West Virginia, the people working inside Berkeley Medical Center confronted fear, grief, moral injury, and uncertainty about who, if anyone, would survive.
If you scanned the mostly empty parking lot, you might have caught a tune from The Book of Mormon emanating from the protective shell of a physician’s silver Subaru. In the ICU workroom, you may have glimpsed two metal angel statuettes standing watch on the supervisor’s shelf. In the hallway, you could have heard a deep laugh accompanied by a humorous name badge clip set against dark blue scrubs: Hello, My Name Is HEY NURSE. Each offered a moment to pause, reflect, and perhaps crack a smile for the first time all week despite the long days and looming sense of dread.
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Like many other aspects of healthcare that changed during the pandemic, the Healthcare is Human (HIH) project began with improvisation. Given the circumstances, it may have been entirely necessary to survive. One early morning, internal medicine physician Ryan McCarthy, MD, held the elevator door and asked two colleagues from different disciplines how they were doing. Together, they realized they were all assuming the same risks as they worked to feed, transport, clothe, and care for patients inside BMC.
What emerged from that simple gesture was the glaring need for a way to share stories at Berkeley Medical Center. Implicit in that effort was the understanding that finding and sharing quiet, beautiful, and authentic experiences could lead to healing, an elusive goal within an otherwise sterile, overtaxed healthcare system.
Healthcare is Human began as a social experiment with a white-knuckled grip on the largest global emergency of the last century. It has since become an ongoing interdisciplinary art and storytelling project. HIH merges oral and visual storytelling with art photography, original poetry, music, and other creative forms to capture surprising moments and the unexpected beauty and meaning woven throughout healthcare. With the artistry of portrait photographer Molly Humphreys, we invite you to engage in close viewing of these moments. Since 2020, Humphreys has captured hundreds of them through her uncanny ability to notice deeply human qualities that many of us pass by during the course of a busy day.
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As you encounter the photographs in this series, we invite you to spend time with the images and ask what they awaken in you through quiet, deliberate observation. This practice, known in the humanities as “close viewing,” is the sustained, attentive observation of a visual object or scene, paying attention to composition, color, light, gesture, and space. It also considers the relationships among those elements and the feelings and interpretations they evoke, deepening perception, expanding one’s capacity to tolerate ambiguity, and strengthening the ability to bear witness. Although the HIH project uses Berkeley Medical Center as its setting, we hope it encourages readers to look more closely at their own clinical spaces and discover moments of surprise, beauty, and humanity waiting there.
About the Photograph: photographed in Brandy’s office at Berkeley Medical Center where the angel figurines remained throughout the pandemic, quietly reminding staff that hope is often found in ordinary spaces.
Series continues, bi-weekly.
