The Healing Muse – Content of Common Experience

In the Editor’s Note for the Fall 2010 issue of The Healing Muse, Deirdre Neilen writes, “Our lives have their own unique roads to travel, but when the detour called Illness enters, we soon learn we have joined, willingly or unwillingly, a very large community with a language and a culture of its own that demands our attention and commitment…we become adept negotiators of hospital mores and insurance protocols, of treatment modalities and drug therapies; the mildest among us morph into warrior-advocates for our loved ones; we stand shoulder to shoulder with our nurses and physicians, our therapists, and our own research. And we write about the bartering, the begging, the rage; we’re not too proud to pray, to swear, to do whatever it takes to get a cure, an extension, a hope. We suffer – either as the person who is ill or as one who witnesses and cares for that one.

“Yet all this suffering somehow does not destroy us; we endure, and we incorporate it into the life we are trying to save, to maintain, to extend…”

And so begins this issue of The Healing Muse in recognition of its content, and the content of each and every issue. Hard core. Truthful. Honest. And recognizable, ‘relatable’ to so many of us.