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Around the Bend

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Rachel Hadas

“You see, the world is coming to an end,”
she says. We’re on the porch; our rockers creak.
Tomorrow vanishes around a bend.

For fifty years she’s been a family friend
whom I should really visit once a week,
now that the world is coming to an end.

I reach out; put my hand over her hand.
We sit and for a moment do not speak.
A rapid shadow slides around the bend

beyond which I’m not keen to understand
what lies in wait. For her, though, every look
confirms the world is coming to an end,

as if we’re inchlings in a giant land-
scape, pulled helplessly toward some black
cavity where the road takes a sharp bend.

We rock. She sighs. Talk of the future: banned.
The past? That’s out too: obsolete, antique.
Marooned in now, she contemplates the end,
leaning a little into that last bend.

About the poet: 

Rachel Hadas is the Board of Governors professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where she has taught for many years. Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia and Poetry (Paul Dry Books, 2011) and a poetry collection, The Golden Road (Northwestern University Press, 2012), » Continue Reading.

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The First Cut

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Ralph B. Freidin

“Just cut through,” said Dr. Trotter, my anatomy professor.

I had read the instructions in her 1947 dissecting manual. My copy, purchased used, was preserved by stale formaldehyde and smudged with the tissues of past cadavers who’d guided earlier first-year medical students from anatomical landmark to anatomical landmark within the human body. 

The time: forty-six years ago. The day: my first day of medical school. 

The dissecting room was on the second floor of a building that had been new in 1927. The windows, opened to capacity, vainly invited in any breeze from the still St. Louis fall afternoon. The cinnamon aroma of dry sycamore leaves floated from the sidewalk to the windowsill before being repelled by the pungent embalming chemicals permeating the room.

Amid the sycamores’ sweetness and the acrid formaldehyde, eighty-eight medical students stood beside forty-four black slate dissecting blocks on which lay black rubber body bags, suffused with formaldehyde. They held the preserved cadavers–our Charons, preparing to guide us on our three-month journey across and through the landmarks of the body, from the land of the living to the land of the dead. From there, each of us would be on our own to

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Florence

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Ben White

When I first met Florence in the ER, she’d already been dying for some time.

I was a third-year medical student doing my internal-medicine clerkship. Florence was a soft-spoken, tired woman in her sixties. To her, I was yet another face asking all the same questions, but she didn’t mind telling her story again–although she did stop in the middle to tell me, “You have beautiful eyes.” I paused to smile, then continued taking my history.

Florence was very overweight, diabetic, a mother to children who were somewhere far away, and a wife to a quiet, slender man with bags under his eyes. She and her husband both seemed less worried than I’d expected.

Only a month prior, Florence’s nagging cough had revealed itself to be a cancer that had taken up half of her chest and part of her brain. She’d never smoked a cigarette in her life.

She’d been briefly admitted to the hospital and then released. After she’d been home for two weeks, her husband had been awakened early one morning by their bed’s shaking: Florence was having a

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The Lone Nurse Lament

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Ray Bingham

The supervisor called, she’s pulling Noel to Peds,
Where, she says, they’ve got really pressing needs.

And Nadia, poor girl, must float to 12 East,
To face the scourge of the adult med-surg beast.

Though the administrators won’t admit to a nursing shortage,
When the census hits the rapids, they attempt this portage.

So here in our quaint little Newborn ICU,
I’m left for the shift with two nurses too few.

The ward clerk’s on holiday, the housekeeper’s sick.
The supervisor’s advice? Make the best of it.

So with a babble of babies to care for alone,
I’ll empty the linens while I answer the phone.

I’ll suction one baby while I tube-feed another,
Hoping my catheters don’t get crossed in the bother.

While I mix special formula, I’ll hang TPN*,
Then gather antibiotics from the pharmacy bin,

I’ll round up the mothers for the baby bath class,
Then while I have them, teach breastfeeding en masse.

I’ll run to alarms wherever they beep,
So they won’t disturb all my little ones’ sleep.

Check all the IV sites, write notes in the

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Lost and Found

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Julie Evans

When Mom died of alcohol poisoning on her sixtieth birthday, I was seventeen and then I didn’t have a mom anymore. 

My heart was crushed, but there was no time to grieve, because my dad was dying. A man in his late fifties, he’d battled emphysema, a brain aneurysm, colon cancer and then bone-marrow cancer. 

Over the following months, and after starting my first year at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, I’d pace the halls of St. Mary’s Hospital as Dad met with the doctors or had his lungs suctioned out. With no health insurance, and no hope of improvement, he was eventually moved to a nursing home. He died a few weeks later, when I’d briefly stepped out of the room.

In 1973, there were no systems in place for a young girl like me–nowhere I could go to talk to somebody who could help me. Instead of feeling lonely or abandoned, I felt numb. I majored in journalism, but also worked as a nursing assistant with cancer patients at the University’s Masonic Hospital. It felt very sustaining; my parents

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Note to My Patient

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You might be surprised to know that I’m lying here in bed still thinking of you two weeks after you’ve died.

During the month that I watched you die, I often wondered what it felt like to be you, with your deep, husky voice, rounded belly and stubborn anger. You’d once owned your own mechanic shop; now you were sitting here in a hospital bed, staring up at the medical team as we whirled in and out of your room. Staring up at me as I drew blood from your central line each morning.

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Here’s the Thing

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Martin Kohn

There are certain days
when death is just
not appropriate

When the mock orange blossoms
scent through the window
next to your sleeping son

When your wife stands naked
at the top 
of the stairs

When the day stretches inside out
and the city vibrates in doo wop
riffs and arpeggios

When the scraps of paper
each containing a random word
fall to the floor 
and assemble themselves
into the sonnet
you could never write–
even if your life depended 
on it

About the poet:

Martin Kohn is director of the medical humanities program at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Ethics, Humanities and Spiritual Care, and an associate professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. With Carol Donley he co-founded the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College and was a co-founding editor of the Literature & Medicine series at Kent State University Press. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and electronic journals.

About the poem: 

Husband: …I just got another poem accepted for publication…uh…and you’re in it.

Wife: Am I going to be embarrassed?

Husband: Well, you’re naked.

Wife (thirty minutes later, having read the poem): You have such a good imagination…I love it…It’s

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Nineteen Steps

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Tuesday morning, eight o’clock, and I have seven things to do. Check vitals, change a dressing, get a patient out of bed, send another to the operating room. Review lab results, give medications, start a blood transfusion.

I have six patients, and they have an average of five morning medications each. I make three trips to the med room for supplies, two trips to the pantry for fresh water.

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Memento Mori

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Craig W. Steele

Quo Vadis Nursing Home haunts the east side of Erie Street,

squatting opposite Roselawn Cemetery, whose wrought-iron gates 

gape tauntingly wide and welcoming. Today will soon be buried: 

three wizened men sit rocking, speechless, on the front porch, 

yearning for the shadowed marble and granite headstones,

no longer afraid of death, only of dying–suspended

between fear and need, stoically awaiting

the next busload of grade-schoolers determined

to brighten their deep-shadowed days.

Editor’s Note: Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as “remember your mortality,” “remember you must die” or “remember you will die” [from Wikipedia].

About the poet:

Craig W. Steele is a writer and university biologist whose creative musings occur in the suburban countryside of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he writes for both children and adults. His poetry has appeared recently in The Aurorean, Poetry Quarterly, Astropoetica, The Lyric, Popular Astronomy, Spaceports & Spidersilk and at Stone Path Review, where he was the featured poet this fall.

About the poem:

“My grandfather spent the last few years of

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Missing Piece

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Ray Bingham

I entered the hospital by a back door. It was evening. As I walked down the quiet corridors, their cinder-block walls, green paint, tiled floors and soft fluorescent lighting granted me a superficial sense of familiarity: I’d walked these halls countless times over the last five years.

Now, however, I also felt a bit apprehensive. I was not supposed to be here. 

Two weeks before, I’d been laid off. It had been the second round of staffing cuts in six months–due, the administrators said, to declining revenues. They made this claim despite the continued high numbers of patients in my unit, the newborn intensive-care unit, or NICU. 

As a veteran nurse, I’d spoken up. The cuts, I’d said, were leading to understaffing, to increased stress among the nurses and to declining care for our fragile patients. Soon after, they’d canned me. 

Not risking the elevators, I climbed the stairs to the third-floor landing outside the NICU. I had a flimsy pretext for visiting: I wanted some of my former colleagues’ phone numbers to use as job references. Mostly, though, I just missed

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Code Blue

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Stephen W. Leslie

I was startled awake at 3:40 am by a loudspeaker blaring “Code Blue…Code Blue.” 

As the hospital’s newly hired chaplain intern, I’d been sleeping in the overnight room. Stumbling out of bed and groggily changing out of my pajamas, I made sure to put on my hospital badge. 

I made my way to the hospital’s “Z” building, where the ICU was located, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. The elevator opened onto a row of doorways, each decorated with a red warning sign: “Stop! Do Not Enter. Authorized Staff Only.”

I picked one and went through. 

I’d guessed right: At the far end of a hallway, a group of gowned nurses swarmed around a woman lying in a hospital bed, her hospital robe trailing off to one side as they worked on her.

I approached the group, feeling a bit intimidated and uncertain of my role. 

“Sixteen minutes ago, her heart stopped,” someone told me. Moving closer to the patient, I saw that she was a short, slightly plump woman about sixty-five years old. With a shock of disbelief, I realized that she was one of the patients I’d talked to earlier that evening. I

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