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.

I learned about acute respiratory distress,
ARDSNET protocol in the ICU.

I left the service,
and so did he, eventually.

The discharge note was written weeks later.
I read it at home.
“The patient expired.”

Penultimately, he had asked,
Do you think I’ll get better soon?

The last thing I heard him say:

I would die
for some watermelon.

Another team watched him die
–without watermelon,

having never heard his voice.

 

 

About the poet:

Bernadine Han graduated from the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and is now a resident physician in psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. 

About the poem:

“Poetry is not my native tongue. I was trying to write about how–despite the collision of the provider’s and the patient’s worlds, and despite the intensive presence of the provider–so much of a person remains unknown to us at some of life’s profoundest and most intimate moments.”

Poetry editors:

Johanna Shapiro and Judy Schaefer