商品簡介
Voices of Teenage Transplant Survivors introduces illness narratives from an unrecognized patient population: recipients of heart, liver and kidney transplants. The book offers unique patient narratives by adolescents who use poetry to explore issues surrounding the changing body, independence, identity, and mortality. Underpinned by a message of healing as they voice hope amid uncertainty, the teens' narratives helped them construct new identities reflected in the term they chose to describe themselves: miracle-like.
While the physical and emotional trials of waiting on transplant lists are featured in popular media, the struggles recipients face years after surgery are not. Organ rejection looms in their future, as do side effects. Illuminating the physical, psychological, and existential challenges confronted by these adolescents, like others with chronic illness regardless of age, the book details the poetry workshops where they articulated experiences silenced by family, friends and the culture of medicine. Close readings and analyses of their writings are included, along with writing prompts and references to narrative medicine theory. The book offers something new for medical and health professionals, medical humanities researchers, students and the public.
