3 Poems from the Wards

Can I Have a Moment of Your Time?
Running, running, running.
On five hours of sleep
Awake before the rise of dawn,
Beaten and brutalized
From the day before.
A long day
In surgery for 4-8 hours
Then on the wards
With minutes on infinity
Draining like the sand
In an hourglass.
But what am I doing here?
Why doesn’t anyone
Explain? Explain? Explain?
It’s dark
And I feel alone
I feel pain
Inside and out
Confident that no one cares
Because no one will explain.
But alas, I’m wrong.
The medical student cares
She checks on me everyday
Sometimes more than once
Sometimes to listen to my heart
Sometimes just to talk.
She listens to my pain
Because my pain is her pain.
My loneliness and confusion are hers
My heart is her heart.

Non- Accidental Trauma
I don’t want to die.
They don’t want me to live.
You go away!
Please don’t leave me!
I want my mommy.
My mommy did this to me.
I can feel my heart failing.
I can see the light.
Please save me!
I will save you!
I want to live.
In you, we will live.
Thank you for my life.
You’re welcome.

The Interior Decorator
Run down old building
Still inhabited by original tenants.
It’s dark to enter
Need light to start the work.
We need a coat of fresh red paint
To brighten the walls
Or to keep the lung adherent to the pleura.
Take out the old,
The gangrenous gallbladder
The calcified valves.
Tidy up what’s left
By getting rid of debris
And tossing out what no longer fits-
Edematous, inflamed, and neoplastic.
Rework the electricity and the plumbing
With nerve grafts
Arterial bypass
Gastrointestinal anastamoses.
Furnish it new
With gortex, mesh,
And the heart of a donor.
All in a day’s work
For the interior decorator.

-Sharon Chow, 2012