The Art of Being Seen with Lu Chekowsky
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What is the premise of Lu Chekowsky’s story and why was it featured on The Nocturnists?
Hey Nocturneist listeners, if you like immersive, powerful storytelling, then take a listen to Overlooked. It's a podcast that features personal stories which bring the women's health gap to life. It's hosted by me, Golda Arthur, and you might say I've got skin in the game. On the show, we've covered topics like ovarian cancer, endometriosis, cervical screening, and funding from women's health research. You'll learn more and understand better, just as I do when I talk to women who tell me their stories. You can listen to Overlooked on your favorite podcast app or head to overlookedpod.com for more.
Support for the nocturnist comes from the California Medical Association.
At the Nocturinous, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality. All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.
You're listening to the Nocturnists, stories from the world of medicine. I'm Emily Silverman. Today we're excited to be featuring one of the stories from our live show in New York City in November 2023 on the theme of taking care, which we co-produced with Danielle O'Frey and Ashley McMullen of the Bellevue Literary Review. This was our first collaboration with BLR, a fantastic literary magazine, which published an issue on the theme of taking care in tandem with the show. It was a great night, filled with stories about the joys and challenges of caring for each other and ourselves, and it marked new territory for the Nocturnists, as it was our first show featuring patient voices as well as the voices of clinicians.
The first story from the show comes from Lou Chaikowski, an Emmy-winning writer and creative director who built a successful career in media through what she describes as, quote, gut, intuition, and addiction to approval. Lou is also a 2023 New York State Council in the Arts fellow in nonfiction literature. But this story isn't about Lou's professional career. It's about her personal relationship to her late mother, Rose, who taught Lou some very important lessons about how to be in the world, including all the ways that charm and charisma can protect people with larger bodies who are trying to navigate a healthcare system that can be really dismissive and sometimes even cruel. After the story, Lou and I talk about Rose's big and warm personality, Lou's personal experiences as a patient, and what it's like to have a larger body while working a high-stakes job in advertising.
But first, let's take a listen to Lou's story, The Art of Being Seen.
It's Thanksgiving morning in Central Florida, nineteen ninety six. There's ice on the palm trees and a public's turkey is defrosting in the sink. Last night my mother Rose fell, and she's been spending the last five hours begging my father and I not to call an ambulance. I can get up on my own, she keeps repeating, but she can't. My mother's voice is rough, she's unrecognizable. She doesn't sound anything like the bawdy, bodacious mom I love, the one who could have been a borscht belt comic if only she'd want him to. In the fall my mother soiled her house coat. Her stomach was so sick from all the cancer treatments. So I helped her change out of it in the middle of the night and I gave her a crisp white sheet to cover herself with.
She draped it over the top of her chest where her breasts used to be, and she looks like a statue of a Greek goddess in the atrium of the Met. I'm twenty-two years old at this point, and this is not at all how I saw my life going. I'm back living at home with my parents. Uh I just got fired from my first job out of college writing the junk mail that comes stuffed in your bank statements. And now I'm working at Circuit City doing double holiday shifts selling portable C D players to the very same girls who made fun of me in junior high school. The thing is I'm not just home because I'm a failure. I'm actually home because my mother is dying. I sit on the floor with my mother all night.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the premise of Lu Chekowsky’s story and why was it featured on The Nocturnists?
0:00–16:50
2
How does Lu describe the moment her mother fell and the emergency response on Thanksgiving 1996?
16:50–21:02
3
What lessons did Rose teach Lu about navigating a dismissive healthcare system as a larger‑bodied patient?
21:02–41:41
4
How did Lu’s mother use charisma to ‘cheat’ the healthcare system and what tools did she pass to Lu?
41:41–57:30