Julie List
Two years ago, I’d just begun my new post as clinical supervisor at the caregiver-support center at a large medical institution. The center offers emotional and practical support to families of patients who are dealing with serious illnesses and hospitalizations.
In my short time there, I’d already encountered many memorable clients, but somehow I felt a special connection with one woman, Maria. A small, intense woman with piercing dark eyes, she often came to see us between her visits to her husband, Felipe, who lay gravely ill in the hospital’s cardiac intensive-care unit.
Always with Maria on her visits to Felipe were their three twentysomething daughters, Rosa, Alicia and Blanca. The family’s closeness touched me–especially when it became clear that Felipe’s
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.
Jenni Levy
I need a new stethoscope. I have to wrap my fingers around the fissures in the tubing to make this one work.
For me, these days, listening to the patient’s chest is more a ritual than a means of diagnosis. After twenty years as a primary-care internist, I now work full-time in hospice and palliative care. I spend more time listening to stories than to hearts and lungs. Even so, there’s something about leaning over and finding the right spot on the chest that makes me feel like a real doctor and helps my patients know that they’re being cared for.
Every morning I put this stethoscope around my neck and walk down the hall of our inpatient hospice unit,
I’m walking very slowly with my dad down the produce aisle at the local supermarket, past the colorful waxed apples, Mexican mangoes and Rainier cherries, and imagining my life’s blood trickling onto the floor from an invisible wound.
As I pass by the misting system spraying the bins of green, red, yellow and orange peppers, past the lady reaching for carrots, past the stock guy balancing the heirloom tomatoes into a precarious stack, I want to scream. The sense of loss is overpowering.
S.E. Street
I had been in London on business all of seven hours when my son, Tom, called me at two in the morning from our hometown, Sydney, Australia.Â
“Grandma’s had a fall. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s all right.”
My mother’s having a fall was nothing unusual; she had always been an unpredictable fainter. My husband and children and I called it her party trick, making light of it to soothe her embarrassment.Â
She had no recollection of these episodes; one minute she’d be seated at the table, and the next, she’d be lying on her back on the floor, her feet propped up on a chair, with the family smiling down at her as if she were Sleeping Beauty awakening
Madge Kaplan
When I read news articles about caring for elderly parents at a distance, I sometimes shake my head. There’s a tendency to put the best spin on the experience: as long as you contact the right people, get the right information and treat the ups and downs as just part of life’s challenges, you’ll be fine. You can do this!
I find myself wondering when the author last talked to a caregiver at her wits’ end–emotions and finances drained, logistics spiraling out of control.
I was a long-distance caregiver for twelve years. I believe it’s best to resist a formulaic approach in favor of one informed by the details–and always, always, humbled by the truth.
Anita Fry
Once upon a time, I was a newspaper journalist: I chased down sources and sweated over deadlines. Then, in mid-career, I switched to doing marketing and communications for a regional healthcare system. This consisted of a large hospital and many outpatient clinics, including a community cancer center.
Because I handled communications work for the cancer center, I also had a seat on the Cancer Committee–an oversight group of oncologists, pathologists, nurses and other specialists, who met quarterly.
I found these gatherings a bit intimidating. My fellow members were welcoming, but they spoke almost entirely in acronyms and medical jargon–“OCNs,” “PET/CTs,” “staging,” “linear accelerators.”
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,
Norbert Hirschhorn
He considered the wasted moult of a once
large, ferocious creature: mouth agape,
muscles twitching with every rattled breath.
Agapé–my friend the scholar marveled
at the homograph, and the thing that feasted
on his father. He laid a futon at the foot
of the high white bed, some books, a laptop,
a thermos. Nearby, an emesis basin,
dentures, bedpan, glass half-full of beaded water.
Madeleine Mysko
We say goodbye, her hand goes up (but not
in time to catch me), then the breach: I kiss
my mother on the cheek. Oops, I say,
you’d better wash your face. We laugh, of course–
that’s the better way to make it through
the chemotherapeutic calendar.
But it’s no joke. Her white cell count is low.
I see my mother back away from me.
I’m treacherous. I’ve not observed the Ten
Solemn Days of Abstinence. Oh whatÂ
to do but put a finger to the lips,Â
and teach the mouth never to kiss, neverÂ
to take a breath, or utter Mother, while
stepping lightly past your door, O Death.
About the poet:
Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing
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