Deirdre Neilen, PhD: One of medicine's tenets is for physicians to commit themselves to lifelong learning. Joan Roger, a poet and emergency physician, provides us with a striking example in her poem "Blind." She completed her emergency residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, from which this poem emerged, she begins blind with an epigram from James Baldwin:
"-- Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
Blind, sedated, in a body bag,
shackles around his ankles,
he is chained to an iron ball
and brought to Bellevue Hospital
by six armed guards from Rikers prison.
The dead-weight of him is hoisted
by the grunting guards, and dumped
with a thud onto a gurney.
I watch as they wheel him
like a shopping cart, to room five.
I am an intern in pale blue scrubs,
new to New York. Algorithms
whirl inside my skull. A stethoscope
drapes around my neck. My brown eyes
have seen little outside of books and classrooms.
They unzip the body bag
and the man's tattooed arms, wider than my thighs,
fall limp over the stretcher.
It is important to see that this is a black man.
It is important to see that I am a white woman.
Together we live in this city of eight million souls.
We breathe the same air.
We are nearly the same age.
His chart says: patient gouged own eyes.
The guards say: he was in solitary.
The tranquilizers shot in his thigh
ensure that he says nothing.
My job: to examine the red mounds
of his sockets. I inch to the bedside.
My hands are shaking.
I have been told
that this is a dangerous man.
I wonder if he is sedated enough.
I lean forward, less than the width
of two fingers between our lips.
His breath mixes with mine.
I fear he will awaken to crush my throat
with hands that fractured a guard's leg,
or so they say. My two eyes are intact
in my head and I am the one leaning over him.
He is the one who was injured,
this man who was once a child with eyes open.
I will never know all that he has seen.
I can only lift his swollen lids
and witness the wreckage --
collapsed casings, lenses dark, distorted
with blood and pus from days in the dark --
a brokenness that cannot be mended
and for a moment the veil
between us lifts and I fall through
his hollow chambers, no longer blind
to what he can no longer see.
