if not a healing wound?
toes missing, trans-metatarsal amputation,
remaining tissue puckering deep pink:
raw beauty in disfigurement.
He shows me pictures on his cell phone,
the toes felt doused with molten metal.
Before debridement: brown-black,
the foot decaying like a leaf in winter.
They add colloidal gold
to glass, sometimes,
to make that ruby color. They heat it,
render it liquid and viscous, and
when it is just right,
the master glassblower blows into it,
One spring day last year, I sat in the office of the man who was to be my husband’s heart surgeon, waiting to have one of the most important conversations of my life. My husband, Craig, sat next to me with his guide dog, Chase, at his feet.
The doctor—tall, dressed in surgical scrubs—came in, introduced himself and sat down. His eyes looked kind; his demeanor was serious.
The dank, loamy smell fills my nostrils. I turn my head, but cannot escape the odor. It emanates from me, this nauseating scent of sickness and neglect.
It is five days since the surgery, five days since my right breast and multiple lymph nodes were removed. I cannot bathe or shower.
My grandmother’s bed bounced high
But I lost the pillow in my hands
Four stitches in the small town
green tiled emergency room
where peering intently into the mirrored light
I was mad because I couldn’t see
The year is 2015, and I’m on my thirteenth surgical mission, but my first to Venezuela. I am a plastic surgeon, traveling with a nonprofit that offers free plastic surgery for people with birth defects such as cleft lip. We’re making a two-week visit to the coastal city of Cumaná, 250 miles east of Caracas.
Halfway through our first day of surgery, I’m asked to come out to the waiting area to assess a young girl named Vanessa, whose mother has brought her as a walk-in patient.
Detroit, January 1997
In a haze of sleeplessness, I open the door to the general-surgery call room (aka “the Garage”) just after midnight. I’m one of two third-year medical students on this call team, and if I arrive first, I might be able to avoid the bunks with the most creased sheets and the pillows with head indentations still on them. The entire general-surgery team sleeps in this one room, with its messy bunks for eight and its odor of stale bodies. That is, we sleep during free moments, in rare fits, interrupted by pagers beeping and the door opening with a flash of light and closing with a loud click.
Climbing to an upper bunk, I get beeped: Code 1.
“Fuck, another gunshot victim,”
“There’s a transplant happening today,” said Sophie Lee, a resident, glancing at her pager.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was a second-year medical student doing a clerkship on the hepatobiliary surgery service (specializing in the liver and bile ducts).
I felt a pang of disappointment: Now I couldn’t go home until after dinner. But there was no use complaining. I followed Sophie to see the transplant recipient, Mr. Franklin.
Rusted nearly through at the base
of their pale green throat,
the amaryllis buds are trying to bloom,
like a person with a tracheotomy
trying to say a poem.
I snip off the buds, leaking dark red
from their diseased wound, trimming
them to clean pale stubs to put in water.
Day to day, the largest furled bud
is loosening into white wrapped wings.
The other three buds are tinier versions
of each other like Russian nesting dolls.
They are plumping with white petals
veined green but their nubs
are softening in the water and I don’t know
if they can ripen without earth.
Lying next
a paper gown, an intravenous tube and silence greater than my symptoms
sterile sheets speak my fear & insecurity saying will you be there with me
come back after the anesthesia has broken up with me and hold me
could you love a cure that hasn’t found itself yet? will your grace go down
with me weeping and swinging because time is spilling its sand and I am
the ocean afraid to leave?
When the machine goes beep, beep–beep long note
and my body lets go of the hold on my soul
the physician notes the time of my go, will you sigh so I know
Andrea Eisenberg ~
Seeing patients in my ob/gyn office this morning, I try to stave off the mild nervousness rumbling inside of me. My good friend Monica is having a C-section this afternoon, and I’m performing it.
We met ten years ago, when I walked my three-year-old daughter into Monica’s preschool classroom for the first time. Monica sat on the floor, a child in her lap and others playing around her. Like them, I felt drawn by her calm, soothing manner and infectious laugh.
Over time, our friendship grew: At school or social gatherings, we always ended up giggling together. We took family trips together, trained together for marathons and supported each other through heartaches–my divorce, the closing of her childcare business–and
Judy Schaefer ~
How can I write a poem, nurse, in this pelted room? Nurse? Nurse!
Memory loss, southern pine–nurse, this is not a poem-writing-room
The floors ooze resin at your footsteps
Spanish moss, from every wall
Spongy trod of medical students
Surgery went well, anesthesia lifted
Cologne of betadine, a boarish root for a vein
at the same time each morning. I welcome
the lady of the mop–tincture of mossy pine
back and forth, she says her prayers. She is my alarm clock.
I peek from crusty eyelids and dread the washcloth
Back and forth–path and path–room and nurse
How does one begin a poem? How to start?
Anesthesia has lifted long
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