Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Winston Oliver is in his fourth year of medical school here at Upstate Medical University. His poem "Emergency Medicine" is a warning to residents and attendings that their words and actions are being studied closely by their trainees. In this poem, he asks, is this the lesson they wish to teach?
"Pod A" was my destination
if I had remembered correctly,
rummaging through papers
as I passed down a hallway
lit more dimly than the surgical wards.
I approached a short muscular man standing nearby
with a confidence gained by stylish pretense,
an aesthetic rebel among physicians
with a shapely beard and long hair tied back.
"Excuse me. ... I'm a medical student expected at Pod A this evening.
Is there someone here I should speak with?"
"I'm a student too!" He said with a smirk on his face.
"Oh ... yes?" I said as I waited for him to explain his demeanor.
"Nah haha you can wait over there. We're signing out now."
I side-stepped through a mass of physicians
toward a classmate trapped well within Pod A
and asked about the man at the front
so quick to affirm his status.
He turned out to be the overseeing physician --
the one running the department that evening.
He was the one who, even among peers,
almost always ought to be addressed formally as "doctor. "
Brian Smith is a second-year med student at Stanford. He overhears a patient talking and reflects that medicine does not have all the answers in his very short poem "Nihilism on the Wards."
At 2 am, walking out
of the ER, I overhear
a patient say, "I hope it's
a recurrence so that
I can start drinking again."
Who am I to judge?
After all, there's a certain
freedom in despair. If you're
already burnt, might as well
try to walk on coals.