On most mornings, Dr Melanie Jansen orders a coffee at Fables Bar and Cafe inside the Princess Theatre in Woolloongabba, Brisbane, settles into her seat, and writes. From the outside, it looks unremarkable. A woman with a notebook, a flat white, a quiet hour before the day begins. But the work she does on those pages sits at one of the most demanding intersections in Australian medicine: the children's intensive care unit, where mortality is low by global standards and yet, in a busy hospital, still claims on average one young life each week.
Jansen is a paediatric ICU specialist at the Queensland Children's Hospital. She is also, as of this month, a published poet. Her debut collection, All That Could Be Lost, released by 5 Islands Press, draws directly from the wards where she has spent her career: the bedsides, the family rooms, the corridor conversations that no parent ever wants to have.
"We live in the pointy end of life and death," she says, without melodrama. "Writing those stories down, and my feelings around them, is definitely a way of processing."
The impulse began long before her current role. As a junior medical student at the University of Newcastle, assisting in the emergency department at John Hunter Hospital, she was tasked with taking a blood sample from an elderly man with Parkinson's disease who had suffered an acute gastrointestinal haemorrhage. She found the needle in on the second try, turned to interpret the arterial blood gas results, and then noticed a single tear sliding down his cheek. The image stayed with her. It became her first poem.
The collection that follows is built from moments like these. A poem called Breaking Bad News captures the specific disorientation of a family receiving the worst possible information: "Is the floor level? The chairs stick, the doorhandles don't make sense." Another, Re-entry, places her at a cafe table making small talk while trying not to think about a baby who died after being assaulted by its father. The book's opening piece, Some Days the Air is Soft, which won a prize in the Hunter Writers' Centre's Grieve competition in 2022, contains the line: "My mirror showed me three grey hairs today, gifts from other people's children."
Her mentor through the Australian Writers Mentoring Program, poet and literary academic Dr Mark Tredinnick OAM, says he cannot read the collection without crying. He describes it as harrowing. What struck him, though, was Jansen's refusal to treat poetry as a relief valve or a soft counterpoint to her clinical life. "The risk of the serious doctor writing poetry is that you imagine you're having a holiday when you write, like there's something soft about it," he says. "And there's nothing soft about it."
Tredinnick showed her work to colleagues, including Steve Meyrick at 5 Islands Press, who encouraged her to submit the full manuscript. The book includes not only clinical poems but love poems, nature poems, and poems about the end of her marriage. "Her work is not just a solipsistic exercise in expressing herself," Tredinnick says. "Melanie has managed to transfigure personal experience into human experience."
Jansen's path to medicine was anything but conventional. She grew up on a semi-rural property in Logan, Queensland, attended a school she diplomatically calls "colourful" (a scar on her finger is from surgery after being attacked by another student), and left without a clear plan. She saved money working in hospitality, went backpacking through Europe, and on a bus between Nice and Barcelona, met a young woman from Melbourne who was planning to study medicine. "I remember thinking: 'Oh. You seem pretty much like me, maybe I could do that.'" Once the idea took hold, it felt, she says, like a calling.
During her medical degree at Newcastle, she took a year off to pursue music, studying jazz piano and singing, forming a band, and writing original songs. Medicine won out in the end, though she still plays occasionally in a combo of cardiologists from around the world who perform at international conferences. The dichotomy between art and science, she insists, is false. As a Churchill Fellow she visited the Fondazione Lanza in Padua, where bioethicist Professor Renzo Pegoraro told her: "In medicine you need to learn about science, but it's humans who get sick, and the humanities teach you about humans." She has carried that line with her ever since.
The evidence increasingly supports that view. Dr Fiona Reilly, a paediatric emergency physician who heads the Australian Centre for Narrative Medicine at the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, says Jansen's writing serves two distinct functions. For healthcare workers, it offers a way to process what clinicians increasingly call "moral injury," the psychological toll of witnessing suffering without always being able to prevent it. For families, it provides something else: evidence that their children mattered to the people who cared for them. "Understanding that your child has had a profound impact on one of the staff who cared for them," Reilly says, "I think it helps for them to know their children are really important to us."
Dr Albert Kim, an intensive care colleague who was mentored by Jansen at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, recalls the first time she gathered the team and read them poetry. "It was such a shock, because there was this huge contrast with the work that we do," he says. "I remember telling Melanie I felt like it was education in how to be a human."
Jansen now reads poetry as part of medical and nursing education sessions. She favours Emily Dickinson's If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking and American poet Edward Hirsch's I Did Not Know the Work of Mourning. "I can give them an hour-long talk on the statistics of how people grieve," she says. "This poem just communicates it to them in a moment."
One poem in the collection, Lily Ivy Grace, is about a real child who died, published with her parents' permission. Jansen writes of how "the souls of our earthly flowers clustered close to you, knowing they could only hold you for this one sparkle in time." After particularly difficult losses, she sends families a card in the weeks following, to let them know they are still being thought of. "The few families who have contacted me after have been happy that I did," she says quietly.
In a healthcare system under sustained pressure, with workforce burnout a serious concern across public hospitals, what Jansen offers is a reminder that clinical excellence and emotional intelligence are not in competition. They reinforce each other. Her book does not romanticise the work of an ICU, nor does it ask for sympathy. It simply asks readers to sit, for a few pages, with the weight that some people carry every day, and to consider what it costs, and what it means, to do so with grace.
All That Could Be Lost is published by 5 Islands Press. Dr Melanie Jansen launches the book at Fuller's Bookshop in Hobart on Saturday, February 28; at the Princess Theatre in Brisbane on Monday, March 9; at Readings Carlton in Melbourne on Friday, May 15; and at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf in Sydney on Saturday, June 20.