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Luca
Richard Weiss
He waited, sandwiched between an angular
housewife with a cough and an accountant
whose clothing draped his skeletal frame.
When we first met he was much younger,
bearded, heavily tattooed, dressed in black,
his bulk dwarfing my consultation room,
a school custodian recovering after a painful
divorce from a guitar-playing, nose-pierced wife
We Were Both New That Day
Bernadine Han
We were both new that day.
He had come for a new knee.
I was doing my first admission.
Suddenly he was short of breath.
He’d had a cough for a long time, yes,
with blood in it.
He decompensated,
and I watched him.
Soul Searching
Brian T. Maurer
Ply the scalpel, crack the vault;
Peel back the layers, parcel the salt:
Galeal, subgaleal, arachnoid place,
Dura mater, subdural space,
Lobus frontalis, sulcus centralis,
Corpus callosum, fornix, and rostrum,
Hippocampus, choroid plexus,
(Anatomy most sure to vex us)
Ventricles: first, second, third,
Cerebellum, stem and cord.
When we’ve exhausted the entire onion,
Tell me, what’s become of someone?
Â
About the poet:
Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatric medicine as a physician assistant for the past three decades. As a clinician, he has always gravitated toward the humane aspect of patient care, and for two decades he has explored the illness narrative as a tool to cultivate an appreciation for humane medical care. He has published numerous vignettes, editorials and essays in national and international journals, as well as two books, Patients Are a Virtue and Village Voices. He blogs online at briantmaurer.wordpress.com.
About the poem:
“Freud wrote that wherever he ventured in his scientific investigations of the mind, he found that a poet had been there first. Modern neuroscience continues to struggle to define the human mind by studying anatomical brain function. It occurred to me
Escape from Chemo
Ellen Diamond
And while the stuff drips in, I’m rolling over
in my mind the two words: Kemo Sabe.
It’s the name that Tonto called his friend
the Lone Ranger, back in radio days.
I could use a trusty sidekick now,
crouched behind the white screen near the door,
ready in an instant to unsheathe
his blade, then back us slowly to the window.
Retrospective
Jack Coulehan
Forty years passed. His body replaced
its cells, with the exception of his heart’s
persistent pump and the mushroom-like paste
of his brain. Only scattered synaptic charts
of his internship remain, etched in myelin,
a few of them deeply. Nonetheless, a dried
umbilical cord connects that powerful womb
to the aging man, across a gulf as wide
as imagination. He doubts there’s a thread
to follow, a blockaded door to open,
or a fusty corridor down which to tread
to a solution: those he hurt, the woman
he killed with morphine, more than a few
he saved. His ally, hope, will have to do.
About the poet:
Jack Coulehan is a poet, physician and medical educator whose work appears frequently in medical journals and literary magazines. His most recent collection of poems is Bursting with Danger and Music, published last year. He received the Nicholas Davies Award of the American College of Physicians in 2012 for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the humanities in medicine.”
About the poem:
“As I approached the end of my medical practice, I thought a lot about its beginning, especially my internship, which was a traumatic experience. Am I the same
What We Carry
Sandra Miller
When I was an intern, we carried everything.
We carried manuals and little personal notebooks, frayed and torn,
crammed with tiny bits of wisdom passed on by a senior or attending.
Yet when a midnight patient rolled in with a myocardial infarction
we didn’t look anything up because there were only four drugs we could use:
morphine for the crushing pain,
nitroglycerin to flush open the vessels,
lidocaine for rebellious rhythms,
and furosemide for sluggish fluids.
I’m old.
We had nothing to block the betas or the calcium channels,
nothing to inhibit the ACEs,
no fancy clot-dissolvers,
just the patient and the strip.
Some made it, some didn’t.
Our white coats carried splatters from blood and iodine and no one even noticed.
When people quit smoking, they just had to quit.
There were no nicotine substitutes,
no patch to stick on or gum to chew or spray to spritz or inhalers to sniff.
No varenicline or bupropion, just quit.
So many smoked, and so many died.
For a while I kept a list in my head of
How It Was When You Stopped Knowing Me
Susan Rooke
When I cannot help remembering, I recall
that the end of your memory arrived
in a Texas spring so wet it churned the rivers,
ripped white frame houses from the banks
and sent them rampaging on the currents
like Pamplona bulls turned loose into the streets.
There were bridges on those rising rivers, and
I cannot help remembering that I crossed them
driving south, looking down to see the sharp horns
of shingled eaves tossing, slinging muddy foam
in the floodwaters down below. I drove hours
just to get you, because you’d lost the knack
of getting anywhere yourself–a block away,
next door, downstairs–and so, when I cannot help
remembering how it was when you stopped
knowing me, I recall that I came for you to guide
you through the rushing streets of your newly
foreign, unfamiliar land, that metaphorical Pamplona,
not as just a native steering a tourist through
the crowd, but as if I’d been your child, as if you
During Lunch at Medical Center Hour Today
a developmental biologist shows us a video of a fertilized eggÂ
dividing into two then four then eight cells–
a day’s worth of differentiation in a minute–
followed by a slide of a week old blastocycst drawn in cross section
with an outer cell mass or future placenta and an inner cell mass
that’s either someone already or destined to be someone
with the same constitutional rights as any non-incarcerated citizen,Â
and while on the subject of genes as destiny the next clip
shows an unfertilized stem cell donated by a monkey at a lab
where the genetic basis of alcoholism is put to the test:Â
the stem cell donor sits in the corner of a cage, big smile on her face
since she was randomized to drink as much beer as her genes wanted,Â
and while that was supposed to be funnyÂ
it wasn’t as funny as the story of the pope who decreed
that no human eggs could be stored in Italian laboratory freezers,Â
prompting wily Italian scientists to freeze dry eggsÂ
for room air storage and quick and easy shipment to countries without popes,
but who needs eggs when stem cells on their own can be encouraged
Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter
Cortney Davis
Spring
Thirty weeks,
and the baby’s not moving.
I listen to deep silence.
Then, the pregnant belly wakes.
From beneath the mountain,
thunder singing.
Summer
The final day of OB rotation
the medical student has a choice–
see the last patient of the day
or run to the coffee shop for a milkshake?
Milkshake wins!
What will I say when they ask me
was he dedicated?
Fall
“Why did you do this? Why did you order that?”
Full of indignation, the chief resident
attacks me
like the attending doctors
stormed at her only this morning.
Winter
There, on her cervix, a red spot
like a berry.
Today, I see her again,
shuffling her way to the bathroom
without her cancer.
She looks so much smaller.
About the poet:
Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner, is the author of Leopold’s Maneuvers, winner of the 2003 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing, winner of the 2010 American Journal