It’s easy to get lost in the hospital. I’m only an intern, and already I know it like the hallways of my old high school, every doorway and doorknob. But overnight, as I float between the floors and the units, answering pages, I quickly lose track of where I am, what time it is, what day it is.
I am vaguely aware that I’m on the fifth floor, the top floor of the hospital, when the nurse approaches me.
“Doctor, the patient in Bed 32.”
Joseph Fennelly
In recent years the medical profession has witnessed a surge in burnout and depression among physicians and other health professionals. Efforts have been made to address this–for example, by offering Schwartz Center Rounds, in which caregivers openly and honestly discuss the social and emotional issues they face. Health professionals can also reduce stress through counseling, meditation or massage, or through practical steps such as cutting back on their working hours.
In the most traumatic cases–those marked by the death of the patient–physicians have yet another powerful source of comfort and emotional support. This support, offered by the patient’s family, comes within a context that allows the caregiver to accept it without forfeiting professionalism.
Amanda Anderson
I softly scrub blood from the teeth of a man who died moments ago. From the chair where I sat quietly writing nursing notes while he quietly ended, my patient’s sallow skin and sunken cheeks looked so peaceful. But the weeks of stagnant residue on his teeth bothered me.
To brush the teeth of someone who was in the process of dying would have contradicted my orders to provide comfort care, and my own good sense. So I waited until he took his last breaths before I closed my computer screen and gathered my tools–washcloth, water, toothbrush.
I brush now, so briefly, for the pride of this man I didn’t know, and I brush for the family that I wish
Christine Higgins
The doctor covers my mother’s hand
with his own hand. Her hand is
a speckled egg he is keeping warm.
The nursing assistant reaches out
to touch the yellow roses,
and murmurs, “Bonito.”
Several people come in and speak
cheerily to the bedcovers and the curtains,
but not to my mother,
who no longer makes eye contact.
Hilton Koppe
Jeez mate, you are really dead. “Really fucking dead,” as you would say. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that. The cop who rang me was right. You must have been sitting in your lounge chair, dead, for at least twelve hours, maybe more. Looks like you were enjoying a quiet drink when you checked out.
I’ve got to tell you mate, it’s pretty weird sitting here at your dining table, with you there, slumped over all mottled and cold, while I’m trying to fill out your death certificate. With your advance-care directive staring at me from on top of all your papers on the table. Was it left there as a gift for me? I did feel
Martin Kohn
(for Helen)
This openness into
This brightness onto
This bodied and
dis-embodied
sunken-eyed
knowing
This close
and blinking
moment
This shutter stop
goodbye
Your round soft
shoulder pillowed
beneath a feeble
hug
The Lord
“not quite ready”
to take you
even though you
and Trixie your cat
had walked the dark path
to him again
Ellen Kolton
“He’s just expired,” said the nurse as I approached Ray’s room in the large inner-city hospital where I work as a patient advocate. “And his wife has just arrived. Why don’t you go in?”
I found Natalie bent over Ray’s body. His hollow cheek was drenched with her tears.
“I’m so sor–“
“I told him yesterday to talk to Jesus,” Natalie interrupted, speaking quickly. “I told him if the two of them decided it was time for him to go, then it was okay with me. I guess they had their talk,” she said, glancing at Ray as though expecting an answer.
Jerald Winakur
White coat, sterile gloves
my instrument dangling
but she finally died
after such a struggle–the young
always struggle so–
I listened to her chest
till it stopped then clicked
off the machine.
It sighed for us all as the air
drained out. And the moon
was still low in the sky
so large, so round–this
is a shape I know well–
and it hung there like a silver disc
auscultating the earth…
But I could no longer listen
as I sat on a night lawn
slowly moistening.
Kristie Johnson
One cold February morning during my third year of medical school, I walked through the entrance of the rural hospital where I was doing a nine-month rotation, and made my way to the nurses’ station. Feeling the warmth return to my face, I set down my coat and bag and hung my stethoscope around my neck.
The charge nurse, Barb, waved me to her computer.
“Kristie, you have a patient.”
She shuffled through papers, grabbed a blank chart and placed the patient’s admission note on top. When she saw the name, her face fell.
“Ah, it’s Peggy.”
Jef Gamblee
As I stand beside the bed in Mr. Jerome’s living room, his pit bull puppy sniffs the body bag lying on a stretcher nearby. His cat curls up on the bedside shelf.
“That dog gonna be a problem?” asks Jude, one of the crematory guys.
“She might get underfoot,” says the neighbor, whose name I can’t remember. “But she’s a lover, not a fighter.”
Jude and Chuck are here to pick up Mr. Jerome, who died of prostate cancer today. His body lies on the bed–the wasted husk of a once lively, athletic man who had taught history in a New Jersey middle school.
I’m a hospice chaplain; Mr. Jerome was my client. I’d known him for about six
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