Q: Your long poem, What We Know So Far is…(Wolsak & Wynn) touches on many salient themes, as the title—which is a nod to the news cycle—indicates. One of the topics we picked up on is the opioid crisis. Would you tell us about how your experience with opioid misuse and abuse as a physician feeds into your work as a poet?
A: My non-clinical academic interests and research have been in medication safety for nearly 30 years now. In 1998 I witnessed a fatal medication error that significantly impacted all involved. In 2011, I set up the first Medication Safety Program at SickKids hospital with a particular focus on reducing harm caused by opioid errors and accidental tenfold overdosing.
In 2017, our friend died from an accidental opioid ingestion while visiting the U.S. Over the next year or two, I read a lot around the opioid crisis and moved my research interests to opioid stewardship. In 2020, I set up the PrOPSR program (Perioperative Opioid Stewardship Program of Research) with the remit of decreasing excessive prescribing of opioids at time of discharge from hospital post-surgery without causing untreated pain in the home. Our work has met with huge success and our program won a coveted international award in New Orleans in 2024. While accepting that prize, I learned that my brother’s wife was terminally ill with cancer, and a few months later, at home in Ireland for her burial, I slept in their guestroom, surrounded by medical supplies and a large amount of prescription opioids. My current work examines humane ways to remove unused opioids from homes of bereaved families after the loss of a child receiving palliative care in the community.
I have written poems about opioids, addiction, and the consequences. One such poem, Qui Vincit, was runner-up in The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustaffson Poetry Prize.
About What We Know So Far is…:
The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.
In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.
About Conor Mc Donnel:
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society.