By Jacqueline E. Lawton

This interview is with Nicole Damari, a UNC–Chapel Hill medical student who helped craft research questions and took and transcribed copious notes for Lawton’s creation of ARDEO.

JACQUELINE LAWTON (JL):

Would you tell readers a bit about yourself and your area of study?

NICOLE DAMARI (ND):

I am a third-year medical student, which means I’ve just moved from a classroom-based to a hospital-based education. I am undecided about specialty—it’s all fascinating—but whatever I choose, I will find a way to incorporate population health and health-justice advocacy.

JL:

What was your role on ARDEO? How did you contribute to the research and development of the play?

ND:

I was involved in the interviews with [the North Carolina Jaycee] Burn Center staff and former patients. I tried to bring a medical perspective to the research process, but since I was still early in my education, I think it manifested more as a medical-student brand of inquisitiveness, which led me to ask questions about the patient/provider relationship, the patient/diagnosis relationship, and the experience of being ill or injured.

JL:

What inspired you to explore the intersection of medicine and the arts?

ND:

Theatre has been a big part of my life since I was 8-years old. My fascination with medicine began around the same time. Since then, I was repeatedly told that I would have to choose between the two. As I got older and presumably closer to this imaginary fork in the road, it became harder and harder to imagine giving up either passion entirely. Sometime near the end of high school I had a theatre teacher who introduced me to the idea that the arts can exist as both a beautiful end in and of themselves and also as a means to some other end. That idea is what finally made me realize that my loves for medicine and the arts were not competing, but two sides of the same coin. I am intellectually fascinated by how we function as human beings—molecularly and socially—and I am fulfilled by helping people achieve better health both physically and emotionally. That framing has shaped how I interact with both fields, and why I continue to pursue projects born out of the intersection of the two.

JL:

In your experience, what is the benefit to medical students exploring the arts and vice versa? Would you encourage your classmates to take part in a project like this?

ND:

Yes. I think medical students are often under the impression that medicine is a science, and I disagree. Medicine is an exercise in the application of science. More specifically, it’s an application of science to a world where the variables are complex and confounded and cannot be controlled. I think the more opportunities we have to evaluate health through different lenses, the better we will be as physicians. The arts provide an incredible opportunity to do this, but I might even suggest that medical students find ways to explore any field they are drawn to but have been told is not “medical” or “health-related.” Having additional academic paradigms is rarely negative. [End Page E-9] 

JL:

What is your greatest takeaway from working on ARDEO?

ND:

On a personal level, ARDEO was a sign that, even in medical school, I can exist in both medical and artistic spaces. Beyond that, my biggest takeaway was that there are aspects of health and illness that are best understood from outside the medical model. As I pursue a broad knowledge base in disease, diagnosis, and treatment, it’s important not to stop actively engaging with issues like stigma, suffering, and social context.

JL:

What is one thing you hope readers/audiences who experience ARDEO to know?

ND:

I hope the reality resonates with them. I don’t just mean the play drew from lived experiences; I mean that the social dimension of illness and injury that ARDEO explores is truly, deeply real. For folks outside of healthcare, I hope the play prompts thoughts about stigma, the experience of illness, and why those are our realities as a society. For healthcare providers or students, I hope the play reminds us that these aspects of health are a real part of education, our patients’ lives, and our profession.

JL:

After being such an integral part of ARDEO, what was it like to be on rotation [at the Jaycee Burn Center]?

ND:

Incredible. The two experiences really completed one another. The rotation was very surgically focused—I spent a lot of time in the operating room, and a lot of time learning about evaluation and treatment. Everything was focused on navigating this one moment in time. ARDEO, on the other hand, gave me the opportunity to think about what it meant for this moment in time to be part of someone’s personal narrative. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to see both the forest and the tree—in that order.

JL:

When we first met, you spoke about how you hoped to address social-justice issues in your work. Specially, you wanted to reduce stigmas around poverty and help improve health outcomes. Do you feel that collaborating with theatre artists is a way to achieve this?

ND:

Oh, yes. I cannot imagine accepting the privilege of being a physician without also advocating to change the social systems that create health inequities. To do that, we need to leverage our full arsenal of potential strategies, because those structures are deeply imbedded in every part of our lives. For me, collaborating with theatre artists will continue to be an important component of this work.

JL:

What’s next for you? Are you working on any other medical humanities projects?

ND:

Classically, the third year of medical school is a pretty time-consuming experience, so recently, my fifteen minutes of daily, protected writing time has been my biggest artistic victory. In the long term, though, I’ve been working with another arts-and-medicine colleague on a play about mental health that we are both very excited about. The more I become immersed in the healthcare, the more I bump into questions where medical knowledge only provides a partial answer—I have little doubt that these will grow into artistic pursuits of their own in time.