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The Florida Times-Union

September 23, 2007

Shands Trauma team members

By Bridget Murphy @ The Times-Union

Joan Huffman, the doctor

Many Shands trauma team members said there are victims of violence they never forget. A sense of outrage seems to come with their green scrubs.

In a pocket of the lab coat surgeon Joan Huffman wears over her scrubs, she keeps a small notebook. When the physician meets one of those patients she can't get off her mind, she takes out a pencil and scrawls notes.

Some of those scribblings turn into poems. In July, she wrote a verse about a patient with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, an injury she saw as a "third eye" that caused a "brain blossom."

Huffman said she shares a special bond with some victims because she survived child and spousal abuse. But dealing with other survivors is never easy.

"Unfortunately far too many times I have to tell a mother her son is dead," the doctor said.

Then the hate Huffman said she sees sometimes in the eyes of those victims' younger siblings makes her heart ache more.

"You know they're going to be the next ones."

This story can be found on Jacksonville.com at http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/092307/met_202020044.shtml.