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You Don’t Have to Put Your Teeth in for Me

Karen Peacock April 6, 2012 No Comments

Karen Peacock

He pulled the covers over his shedding skin,
Put a napkin over his phlegm-filled cup
Turned the volume down on the TV
And up in his ear,
Cleared his throat through the foggy mask,
Tipped the seat down to his bedside commode
As he reached for his teeth,
And I said, You don’t have to put your teeth in for me.

About the poet:

Karen Peacock is a board-certified art therapist working on the palliative care unit at the Memphis VA Medical Center. She received her master’s in art therapy from Pratt Institute in 2008.

About the poem:

“This poem was inspired by an experience I had with a patient on the palliative care unit. He seemed to

Enduring Guardianship

Sue Ogle September 9, 2011 No Comments

Sue Ogle

I was cool on the way to the lawyer, we’d talked it all through, no problem.

So why am I remembering the old kauri house where the wiring was dodgy
and I held my breath as she flicked the switch to turn off the power? How can
I do it without her, flick off the switch of life, decide on her fate or my own,
without consultation, alone? What if she goes and I’m inconsolable?
What if she stays and doesn’t know me?

And why am I seeing Durdle Door, that day when the Sea Scouts came upon us;
we were naked, swimming alone, so we thought. Why am I feeling the sting
of the storm on Mt. Aspiring as she yanked me

Mementos and Memories

Paul Rousseau July 15, 2011 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.

She is wearing a blue blouse stained with something orange, perhaps Jell-O, and white pants and white socks. A worn gold wedding band adorns the fourth finger of her left hand. Her hair is a shiny gray, perfectly coiffed, and her face is etched with deep wrinkles, a testament to eighty-nine years of life.

A tiny bedside shelf displays two faded black-and-white photos from the 1930s or ’40s: one is of Delores in her twenties, a demure smile on her face; the other shows Delores with a young man

Losing My Vision

Sheila Solomon Klass February 25, 2011 No Comments

Sheila Solomon Klass

Sunday, September 26 of this past year began normally enough. I did what I do every day, first thing: I put on my glasses and tested my vision. I’m eighty-three years old, and although I’ve always been nearsighted and have lived with glaucoma for thirty years, I’ve developed a worse complaint: AMD, age-related macular degeneration, in my left eye.

My ophthalmologist diagnosed the AMD after I told him that, when I was reading, the print seemed faded and straight lines looked bent. I learned that AMD eats away at the macula, the central part of the retina, gradually destroying your ability to read, to watch television, even to recognize familiar faces. Today my left eye sees shapes and colors but no details;

Third Party

Mary E. Moore July 16, 2010 No Comments

Mary E. Moore

Tipping forward to escape
the wheelchair’s confines, the ancient one
pleads with her feet, “Go home.”

It’s her companion who volunteers
the Chief Complaint: “Ever since her stroke,
Mother’s back seems to hurt.

Her doctors say there’s nothing can be done,
but I thought that perhaps a specialist ….”
She strokes the old woman’s shoulders.

“Does it hurt here, or there, or if I touch this?”
My fingers probe among birdish bones.
Ignoring me, the patient whimpers, “Home.”

When the daughter’s eyes register pain, I say,
“I’ll inject this spot near her sacroiliac joint.
It may provide relief, in any case do no harm.”

I fill in the charge sheet attached to the chart.
Low back pain. Trigger point injection.
Return PRN. But how should

Confessions of a 75-Year-Old Drug Addict

Arlene Silverman January 22, 2010 2 Comments

Arlene Silverman

The physician, a slim, young man with a shaved head and intense, dark eyes, reaches out to shake hands. I fumble to extend one hand while the other clutches a questionnaire that I haven’t finished filling out.

“That’s okay,” Dr. Gordon says. “You can finish later.”

He can tell that I’m nervous, but seems to understand. He knows that I’ve had to sign in at a window surrounded by other patients, many younger than my own children. Some of them look dazed; others have dozed off. Still others, alert, look as if they’d just come from their job at the bank.

Me? I walk with a cane. My clothes have been carefully chosen to look presentable. I’ve come

Reflections From a Senior Citizen

Dorothy Kligerman January 8, 2010 No Comments

I used to talk of fun and games

Now I talk of aches and pains.
I used to paint the town bright red
Now at nine I am in bed.

I used to dream of lovers bold.
Now if truth be told
The only men who interest me
Are those with a medical degree.

“Why,” you ask, “have they such clout?”
Well–we have so much to talk about:
There’s my arthritis and stenosis,
Hypertension, scoliosis.

In a cozy room, alone, we chat.
We never have a lover’s spat.
So keep your handsome Romeos
I’ll always take those medicos!

About the poet:

I am ninety-five years old, widowed, with three

Maman

Paul Gross November 20, 2009 No Comments

Paul Gross

At a recent religious service I attended with Maman, my 87-year-old mother, I watched her fumbling attempts to find hymn number 123, “Spirit of Life,” in the hymnal. I held my book up, opened to the appropriate page, so that we both could sing from it.

She glanced up momentarily, tightened her lips, hunched forward and resumed turning pages, finally arriving at the song when the congregation was singing the second verse, which she needed help finding–what with her poor vision and the swirl of notes and words on the page.

As this ritual repeated itself, hymn after hymn, it occurred to me how much cozier it would be if my mother and I could share from the same hymnal.

Giving Care

Ronna L. Edelstein June 26, 2009 No Comments

Ronna L. Edelstein

When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.

I spent the next half-century living

Rx

Veneta Masson October 3, 2008 No Comments

Veneta Masson

Politicians…were quick to rise to the defense

of a particularly vulnerable population. As a group,
dual-eligibles [Medicare-Medicaid] have incomes below
the poverty rate…and take an average of 15 medications a day.

Washington Post
January 14, 2006

This is how it works:
as wealth trickles down
to the poor and old
it turns into pills.

So M and S, their slender portfolios
long since depleted, can still
compete for bragging rights.
I take twenty a day, says M.
Ha! counters S, I take so many
they had to put in a port.

G presides over the corporate enterprise,
his specialty, mergers and acquisitions.
With combined assets (his own and his wife’s)
filling two cupboards, he allocates resources,
tracks inventory, restocks
from Canada and

A Brush With the Beast

Paul Gross June 13, 2008 No Comments

It all begins one Sunday morning when Mrs. Morris, a 75-year-old retiree with a heart condition, trips on her way out of church. She falls flat on the sidewalk, can’t get up, and ends up in our Bronx emergency room. A CT scan shows a pelvic fracture, and she’s admitted to our inpatient team.

When I join the family medicine residents to see Mrs. Morris the following day, she can’t get out of bed. She’s got short, unruly white hair and a gee-whiz expression that charms us. “What a pain!” she says. Given how close she lives to the brink–terrible circulation has cost her one heart attack and several toe amputations–I’m impressed with her good cheer.

Things looks promising. Follow-up studies confirm that the

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: geriatrics

You Don’t Have to Put Your Teeth in for Me

Enduring Guardianship

Mementos and Memories

Losing My Vision

Third Party

Confessions of a 75-Year-Old Drug Addict

Reflections From a Senior Citizen

Maman

Giving Care

Rx

A Brush With the Beast

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: geriatrics

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