Fall/Winter 2006 - University of Rochester Medical Center

medical literature
When the blood fell
short of her toes
by Neeta Jain, M.D.
I would advise my mother the
same if the blood fell short of her
toes, the anesthesia doctor tells.
The useless leg, staining rouge, sits in
the crook of my arm. I brace it,
the knee’s right angle corners my
elbow in my hip
which bruises later.
the
poetry
of
medicine
She cannot endure intubation
from the weakness in her beat,
eyeliner straight edged below
a cloudy clean cap. We search
at her ischium
with numbing sticks, rooting
to quiet the sharpness of nerves.
My gut crumples
with her face.
I’ll make you a nice wooden one,
her husband catches their tears
on his big thumb. Mine dry
behind my eyes.
Morning rounds, a bloody limb, surgery, cadavers, morphine, breast exams, deathbeds, a first
night on call in a coronary care unit. These are the realities of a medical life. They also are the
subjects of poems by physicians and medical students in a new anthology, Body Language:
Poems of the Medical Training Experience.
The anthology was edited by Neeta Jain, M.D., Dagan Coppock, M.D., and Stephanie
Brown Clark, M.D., Ph.D. Jain, who initiated the project, is a 2004 graduate of the University of
Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Clark is an assistant professor of medical humanities
in the School of Medicine. Body Language was born during a workshop Jain attended in
Squaw Valley, Calif., at the start of her fourth year of medical school. She had been writing
throughout medical school as a means of understanding the experiences she and her classmates
were having. At the conference, she met Coppock and others with a similar need to write.
“I was struck by the richness and quality of the material and realized how powerful a
compilation of many voices, in the direct, concise, playful language of poetry, could be,” said Jain,
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ROCHESTER MEDICINE