My wife is a ship docking from war. The doctor maps out her body in ink, holding up her breast with two fingers, explains what needs to be removed, that maybe we can keep the nipple. Her body is a flooding home. We are afraid. We want to know what the water will take away from us, what the earth will claim as its own. I lick my lips and she looks at the floor.
Later, at home, she calls her sister. They talk about curses, the evil eye, their aunt who drowned, all the money they need to send back. It is morning when she comes to bed and lets me touch her. I am like a thirsty child against her chest, her skin is parchment, dry and cracking.
My wife sits on the hospital bed. Gown and body together: 41 kilos. She is a boat docking in from war, her body, a burning village, a prison with open gates. She won't let me hold her now, when she needs it most.
We stare at the small television in the corner of the room. I think of all the images she must carry in her body, how the memory hardens into a tumour. Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.
what is entitlement to an American fetus – a womb lined in hundred-dollar bills, a mother who doesn’t know she’s vulnerable sitting in a gold tower, picking out a golden goblet for her prenatal vitamins. this isn’t evidence-based – it’s a whim of the tax-slashed, a sudden shift in mood, like telling the chef it’ll be Indian, not Chinese tonight (never say they don’t appreciate diversity).
Read the rest here > https://cdcpoetry.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/another-epidemic-irene-mathieu/
Irène Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher who has lived and worked in the United States, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, and elsewhere. She is interested in social determinants of health, human rights, global public health, community-engaged research, and medical education. Irène is winner of the Bob Kaufman Book Prize and Yemassee Journal‘s Poetry Prize, and author of the book orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017) and poetry chapbook the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press & studio, 2014). She holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a MD from Vanderbilt University. https://irenemathieu.com/poetry/ https://theconversation.com/literature-inspired-my-medical-career-why-the-humanities-are-needed-in-health-care-217357
Here too are dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear murmuring, the revolt of immense estates.
~
Prayer to the Living to Forgive Them for Being Alive
Charlotte Delbo
You who are passing by
well dressed in all your muscles
clothing which suits you well
or badly
or just about
you who are passing by
full of tumultuous life within your arteries
glued to your skeleton
as you walk with a sprightly step athletic awkward
laughing sullenly, you are all so handsome
so commonplace
so commonplacely like everyone else
so handsome in your commonplaceness
diverse
with this excess of life which keeps you
from feeling your bust following your leg
your hand raised to your hat
your hand upon your heart
your kneecap rolling softly in your knee
how can we forgive you for being alive…
I beg you
do something
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin in your body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life.
~
"I have never experienced anything like I experienced in Gaza…"
This doctor spent two weeks over Christmas working in the European Hospital in Khan Younis with the charity IDEALS, helping treat people with severely traumatic wounds.
I became a doctor to treat people in Gaza. I had to leave for 14 years to get the degrees and certification necessary to become a nephrologist [a kidney specialist]—a specialty I chose because there was a need for it. When I returned, I was shocked by the lack of resources available to me for treating my patients. Even before this war, those of us providing medical care in Gaza were operating in far-from-optimal conditions. We regularly suffered from a dearth of vital medications, essential labs, and instruments critical to our work. In my field, this meant we had trouble administering dialysis to patients; we were also frequently unable to obtain immunosuppressants and antifungal medications, as well as medications used to treat bone disease, anemia, and advanced kidney disease. Patients undergoing dialysis usually receive medicinal injections [to stimulate the bone marrow to produce red blood cells], but when we were unable to access that medication, which was often, we had to administer blood transfusions instead.
Since the war, things have become increasingly dire. We are dialyzing more and more patients—including those who’ve come [to us in the center of the Gaza Strip] from the north, some of whom have suffered kidney injuries from the bombardments. We are cutting the duration of dialysis sessions in half. Many medications are completely unavailable. Doctors make decisions based on hunches because we don’t always have access to labs. Yesterday, I had to stop the resuscitation of a patient who went into cardiac arrest in the dialysis unit, because if she made it back to life, we had no ventilator to offer her. We have to prioritize patients who are younger, healthier. We have lost the ability to provide true care.
This is not the medicine I thought I would be practicing. I always wanted to progress in my field—to learn more, to teach more. In Gaza, I haven’t been able to do that. I hope to raise my kids to be ambitious—not to think about war, missiles, rockets. Every day, I see a fear in their eyes that I can’t do much about. It’s very painful. If you have kids, you know how horrible it is not to be able to comfort them, to ensure they are alright, to make them hope for anything beyond living one more day. We want to live freely like other people—to grow scientifically and economically, to walk in the street without fearing bombardments, to make plans. We want to be able to learn, think, grow, travel, dream—to feel like we are really human. Not to think only about meeting our basic needs. This is what life has always been about for us, and now—I want the world to know—we are being eradicated en masse. This is not what life should look like.
— Dr. Hammam Alloh, nephrologist at Aqsa Martyrs and Shifa Hospitals, as told to Maya Rosen, October 26th
[Note: On November 11th, Dr. Hammam Alloh was killed in an Israeli airstrike.]
Refaat Alareer: “If I must die you must live to tell my story, to sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth and some strings (make it white with a long tail), so that a child, somewhere in Gaza, while looking heaven in the eye, awaiting his dad who left in a blaze – and bid no one farewell, not even to his flesh, not even to himself – sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above, and thinks for a moment, an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”
~
~
Casualty
They bring us crushed fingers, mend it, doctor. They bring burnt-out eyes, hounded owls of hearts, they bring a hundred white bodies, a hundred red bodies, a hundred black bodies, mend it, doctor, on the dishes of ambulances they bring the madness of blood, the scream of flesh, the silence of charring, mend it, doctor.
And while we are suturing inch after inch, night after night, nerve to nerve, muscle to muscle, eyes to sight, they bring in even longer daggers, even more dangerous bombs, even more glorious victories,
I am pleased and relieved to see this communication:
To Staff and Students of the SoM, Trinity College Dublin.
7th Feb 2024
…and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore…’. From The Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 2023
Dear Staff and Students,
I write to you about the current conflict in the Middle East acknowledging that there are many conflicts around the world that may deserve special mention. But today, as a physician and the Head of a Medical School, I feel the need to say something about the effect of this war on healthcare workers and the places they work. I recognise and agonise with Jewish, Muslim, and other Israeli citizens who were viciously attacked, murdered, and raped by Hamas militants on Oct 7th 2023, but in the spirit of compassion for all human life, I cannot stay silent about the current catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
Trinity School of Medicine has been training physicians and surgeons since 1711, and latterly also physiotherapists, occupational therapists, radiation therapists, dietitians, and scientists. These alumni join and contribute to the global healthcare community with its characteristics of marrying scientific rigour with compassion and love for their patients. Many of our current staff and students have family and friends directly affected by the conflict. In Gaza these professionals now face an impossible task, being asked to provide treatment under unimaginable conditions, some even paying for their professionalism with their lives.
The reality is that Gaza is being destroyed. The unconscionable toll of thousands of civilian deaths, and injuries most of them women and children, has seen the complete destruction of the healthcare infrastructure. Hundreds of healthcare staff have perished, others arrested and detained, leaving abandoned and vulnerable the chronically sick, neonates, pregnant women, children and adults with special needs. From the ruins of Gaza, we are already witnessing the emergence of starvation, communicable diseases and widespread psychological trauma.
I, therefore, echo the plea of the UNHCR for all parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law. I call for the immediate and unconditional release of all civilians held hostage. The people of Gaza and the infrastructure they rely on – including hospitals, shelters, and schools – must be protected. Aid including food, water, medicine, and fuel must enter Gaza safely, swiftly and at the scale to fully meet the needs of the population.
Accordingly, I also call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. I particularly call for the protection of healthcare workers who put their lives on the line every day to provide succor to men, women and children caught up in this senseless violence.
For those TCD School of Medicine staff and students who are affected by this tragedy, from every side, TCD has special supports in place to help and I encourage you to use them https://www.tcd.ie/global/incidentresponseunit/
I had “breasts like a twenty-five-year-old,” and that was why, although a mammogram was done the day of my year-end exam in which the doctor found the lump, it told her nothing: small, firm, dense breasts have and hold their dirty secrets till their secrets damn them. Out of the operating room the tumor was delivered, sectioned, cold- packed, pickled, to demonstrate to residents an infiltrative ductal carcinoma (with others of its kind). I’ve one small, dense firm breast left, and cell-killer pills so no more killer cells grow, no eggs drop. To survive my body stops dreaming it’s twenty-five.
from https://watermark.silverchair.com/criticalvalues2-0033.pdf
confirming proof of life through the steady gallop
of beating heart and burbling lungs
And I wonder how this is not considered
a type of precious jewelry as well
the stethoscope worn by a rare few of my sex
Mangalsutra (Hindi/Marathi): Auspicious thread/necklace in Hinduism, which a groom fastens on his bride during their marriage ceremony signifying the joining of two souls.
“Jim asked me if I wrote poetry. I told him that I had been writing most of my life. I explained that I’d loved poetry when I was young, … What I didn’t mention was that I hadn’t written a poem in years. At the beginning of medical school, I’d thought that I would write every day, inspired by new patients and clinical experiences. But studying and practicing medicine turned out to be all-consuming. At home, I left a blank sheet of paper on my desk, in case inspiration came, but I was always rushing out the door or off to sleep. I was also coming to terms with being gay. I started slipping into the same depressive symptoms that I was learning about in my medical textbooks. The page remained blank.
Ars Medica 