Sally Helmi, 2020, I Don't Know How Much Longer We Can Do This.
“a reflection break”, 2020
the experiences that i am a part of are so intense that i often don’t know how to navigate how much space they hold in me and how long they can live in me. despite how exhausting being a nurse often is in this crumbling healthcare system, there are many moments where having perspective into this world really allows me to experience a reality where no one is a stranger, where we can see what our communities need and look like and sound like in their most vulnerable states. we need to be actively caring and actively loving, there is no room for desensitization. i see so many people who burn out and stop investing energy into real care-taking in healthcare and outside of it; so many people see so much wrong that they don’t even try to do right anymore. i can’t always promise that someone will be alright or if their treatment will work, but i promise to hold your hand, to call your family, to walk you to your car, to advocate for you, to make you laugh, to honor where you come from, to cry with you, to grieve with you, and to heal with you.
“to imagine the impossible”, 2021
to pause and pull apart in this moment is a privilege my parents would tell me— to embrace the continued analysis and study around our need for collective healing while in community, in conversation and through experimentation w/in and outside of ‘art’, hospitals, and of structured space, as a nurse and as a person trying to survive. to imagine a sustainable culture that allows for the underrepresented and the underserved to heal and to learn and to teach. to give less power to the enemy, as they are also an illusion created by the powerful. to resist the trick of politics and nurture space for our healing, our analysis of pain and suffering outside of the institution— this has become a place to learn, to give care and share care— to imagine the impossible.
“a writing exercise”, 2020
patient in chair 2 is waiting for chemo. i clean off the extra dusty table in the back of the unit and open her chart on my computer. quickly start interviewing her. i set up her table with supplies, it’s time to access her port, i asked her if she wants me to use the spray we have that is used to decrease pain, she asked if it has a scent and i said no and proceeded to set up for the procedure. after peeling open all the supplies into my sterile field — one by one, in complete awe at how much waste this has produced; i uncap the thick silver needle that’s in my one hand, holding her upper chest down with the other. i let her know i’m going to count down before the needle goes in. her face with a semblance of fear. i felt like i was trespassing her body because of her expression signaling she didn’t want this but perhaps desperate for some kind of healing and willing to do whatever it took.
Sally Helmi (b. 1993) most recently read: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and All About Love by Bell Hooks. Helmi is an Egyptian-American artist, curator and nurse who practices and lives in Newark, NJ. Helmi was born in Bayonne, NJ, the daughter of two Coptic immigrants. She was educated in the public schools of New Jersey and completed a BSN from William Paterson University in 2015. Throughout her studies Helmi worked as a Patient Care Assistant and in 2015 transitioned to provide care as a Registered Nurse, working at a trauma hospital in Paterson, NJ. Helmi is passionate about exceptional and humanistic care and has compassionately provided nursing care in a wide array of hospital settings, currently working and specializing in Oncology/ Hematology Adult Infusion. Marrying their practice in nursing and art, Helmi's recent visual artwork explores and reframes the use of the nursing process; her mixed-media collages embrace an anatomical and medically-inspired visual language that narrate the dynamic stages of healing, centered on studying themes of caretaking and touch. In 2018 she joined a residency at Index Art Center, where their current studio practice is located and where they had their first solo show, Intimately Held: Safe-Keeping through Touch. Helmi is active in their community in Newark, NJ and has organized and curated exhibitions and wellness events that aim to be accessible to the public. In 2021, she joined the inaugural cohort of Dark Study, a virtual and experimental year-long program centered on art. Mentorship is an essential part of nursing which has inspired Helmi to precept nurses throughout her work and in 2019 she joined NYFA as an artist mentor for their Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program in Newark, NJ. In 2021, she joined First Tech Fund, supporting and advising photography to underserved youth students in Brooklyn, NY. Helmi's interdisciplinary works have been exhibited in many of the major galleries and community centers in Newark and northern New Jersey and profiled and featured in the New York Times, Allure, NY Post, Scarlet Magazine and LAND Collective.
A PORTFOLIO OF WRITING BY NURSES: TABLE OF CONTENTS • Tina Carlson • KD Seluja • Sally Helmi • Christine Riley • Jane Slemon • Renata Bubadué • Diane Kraynak • Geraldine Gorman • Charles March III • Mary Ann Thomas • Sarah Comey Cluff • Brenda Beardsley • Shirley Stephenson • Nicole Aicher • Amanda Reilly • Angela Todd • D. Liebhart
In 2021, well into the Covid pandemic, The Other Editors of Fence, Sarah Falkner and Jason Zuzga, issued "A Call for Writing by Practicing Nurses" that circulated widely, the text of which you can read here.
In Issue #39 and here online, we include the resulting portfolio of essays, poetry, and witness across the nursing specialties. The work offers us hard-fought wisdom, raw emotion, beauty, and no easy answers. This is a Covid-era Fence space of encounter between the art of nursing and the art of literature, for literary writers and nurses to meet, learn from each other, and cross-pollinate through words.
You can read an introduction to the work by Sarah Falkner, here.
