The best we can do is when we are patients ourselves we can be alert and we can pay attention to what happens to us and when we write about patients we can be alert as we try to enter their narrative and see from their perspective. Once when I was standing beside a patient who had a new surgical incision, for just a moment, I imagined what it would be like if I could actually enter the patient's body and become them for the next several days of their hospitalization. This poem developed out of that thought and that pretending. Becoming the Patient 1. First, the white gauze.
Voices come and go.
The hall lights dim. Then, skin pressed to bone, I enter the patient. All day, my fever rages. I see the nurses are crying, eyes full of waiting, eyes shiny as ice. Beyond my window, a field.