Jeff Nisker Libri

Confined to the Sidelines is a juxtaposition of the poems Jeff Nisker wrote in the time of COVID with four of his related social-justice poems. With this volume, Nisker hopes to imbue new compassion in health professionals, other health-policy makers and the general public, who all are or will be immersed in COVID's resulting diminishment of our health and social systems. COVID altered Nisker's life before he ever heard the word COVID, when he developed pneumonia from COVID in February 2020, two weeks before the world learned that a "virus of concern" had been rampant in Wuhan Province in China since Autumn 2019. Confined to the Sidelines is the only book in which Nisker's poems have remained as poems. His other creative writings have begun as poems, but have morphed into plays for wider engagement. Indeed several of his plays are but compilations of long prose poems, interwoven into a theatre format. Nisker decided the collection of poems in Confined to the Sidelines should remain poems because the concision of poetry is important in healthcare education due to the limited curricular minutes. Within these limits, poetry's precision can simultaneously unpack a topic and imbue compassion through a tightly-focused social-justice lens.

Love and Injustice in Medicine delves into the injustices Jeff Nisker has encountered throughout his medical career, including the inherent injustice of illness. Utilizing narrative, Nisker addresses health-ethics dilemmas while advocating for compassion in healthcare. This work is relevant to health professionals, students, and anyone interested in compassion and social justice within the medical field. Nisker begins with a personal experience of being immobilized in an MRI machine during a cerebellar stroke, which brings to mind a promise he made to a woman named Ruth. She had confronted him about the failures of the healthcare system while suffering from inadequate support, ultimately leading to her death. Although deeply affected by her story, Nisker only began to write it after undergoing chemotherapy. He reflects on a pivotal moment from his youth when his uncle urged him to pursue medicine, framing it as a moral imperative against tyranny, which overshadowed his initial aspiration to be like Atticus Finch. The social-justice values instilled by his mother and grandmother, both victims of breast cancer, resonate throughout the narrative. Nisker shares his journey as a medical student, clinician, and advocate, arguing that social justice in Canadian healthcare is diminishing due to privatization and a shortage of physicians. His accessible storytelling aims to engage not only healthcare professionals but also the publ