Super-Sized Series

 Disease Doesn’t Discriminate

  

Scent by Lynn White

If they hadn’t asked her
to smell the nice scent
all would have been well.

She had no memory 
of the operation 
when she was a baby,
before she could even speak.
She could speak now
and spoke at length
about her sore, sore throat.
That was all she remembered 
day after day.

So if they hadn’t asked her
to smell the nice scent
all would have been well.

They said her tonsils were bad
and in the hospital
they would put her to sleep 
for a little while
and take them away.
They promised ice cream after
to soothe her aching throat.
So she went to the hospital.
She went with the nurse
and saw the doctor.
They were stiff, starchy and stern
and she didn’t like them much
but she lay on the trolley when asked,
obediently.

If only they hadn’t asked her,
if only she hadn’t remembered
the scent from before.
There would have been 
no screams, no stamping 
up and down on the trolley.
The nurse would still 
have her cap on
and the doctor would have
no fist or feet marks
on his white coat,
no red hand mark
on his pale cheek.

Yes, if they hadn’t asked her
to smell the nice scent
all would have been well.

But they did ask her.
They did ask her.
The scent wasn’t nice.
She knew it.
And there was no ice cream
afterwards either.
They’d lied about that
as well.

First published in Mocking Owl Roost

My Second Birthday by Rose Mary Boehm
 
There was a healing fairy dangling from the bed on wheels,
a kiss and a promise, a brush from the sterile corridor air.
There were walls made of shining steel and doors closing.
and masks, many masks. And blue, yes, a lot of blue
and white hands. The clanging of metal on metal.
Boxing day, the English call 26 December, when those
delivery boys, the dustmen, the milkmen, used to come
for their yearly tip. It was the end of the year 2000.
A tip for the box, Sir, Madam.
A day for me to beg for my life.
The meningioma had come with stealth. Like a spy
in the night. Undercover for 14 years it had grown
its flesh and infiltrated my brain where I gave it
shelter. Until it got too big for its hiding place.
And I dreamed, and I died, and I went into the light,
and I was spat back out onto the operating table.
 
It’s been a rollercoaster, but these years brought me
joy and pain and joy again, a gift of infinite value, of words,
song, sunshine and fog, frost and heat, the rushing brook,
breakfasting on figs in competition with the wasps,
vines succumbing with a gesture of defeat
under the weight of their clusters of grapes,
the heat shimmering over the fields of the Castilian plateau,
poppies, cornflowers, and my dog making friends with the fox.
 
Followed by the secretive green of the rainforest, the endless sand dunes
of Peru’s coastal desert, the song of the the Andean cock-of-the-rock,
the screech of the seagulls, the unforgiving hawk,
condors floating on air and three-meter wingspans.
 
And every birthday I celebrate with you, the man who would
not let me fall.

Blue Jeans by Laurie Byro

Her disease was busy
making lesions in the brain.
She sat on her couch, eating Ben
and Jerry’s, dodging guilt
about how her day had been.
It was Valentine’s Day.
She was starting a love affair with herself.
She was tired of writing poems
about deer in the woods, or snow falling.
She was thinking about endings.

The thought of need and dependence
depressed her. She bristled when
the well-intentioned changed the subject,
or stopped picking fights.

The jeans had come from London.
Fringed and funky, they were studded
with a Swarovski crystal. Her husband
said she looked hot in them,
her navel peeking over the waist.
She imagined the salesgirl’s expression
as she plunged the needle into her belly.

This was the first week she had injected
the medicine. She was afraid of dying
too soon to wear the jeans out or of winding
up in a chair.

When she bought the jeans, she wore them
right out of the store. She walked
all the way home. Meanwhile, she wondered if
the woods and the deer
without someone to narrate them,
would wither or startle, steal
someone else’s imagination.

She would dutifully write about the
current attack on her brain, her body.
She would pick up her tablet
filled with paper from these woods,
empty until then
so that she might record this vagrancy.

A doe is standing in a grove of birches,
licks the barb in her side, becomes
startled by the taste.

It is snowing. It is still snowing.

Note: At the age of 42, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and took part in a test study for the drug Copaxone for 23 years. I had to inject the drug by needle in my belly every day and drive to the hospital an hour away once a month for 25 months and have an MRI for an hour, with no music to be in the study.

First published in Luna under the title Vagrancy


The Waiting Room by Arlene Levine

Dermatologist’s office. Tuesday morning. 11:30 a.m.
Soft classical music. Chopin, I think. Hard wood chairs.
Every seat is filled but one. I take my place, dreading the wait.
The other patients are elderly, their feathery white caps
a contrast to my bark brown hair now copper-streaked
with henna to hide the first gray strands. 
A late October light shines through their skin giving
it the appearance of golden Depression era glass.
The frailest woman wears large gauze bandages
on her face and arms. When she catches me observing 
she flashes the most loving of smiles. My tense face
relaxes and I return the kindness, eyes shining
warmth for a fragile stranger. 
Why am I smiling,
I think a moment later, here to investigate
a minute freckle, a recently arrived gray dot
that henna will not help. 
 
The young doctor enters the waiting room, calls a name.
No one moves. She calls again and we patients set to looking
at each other, wondering whose turn it is, and why they don’t go.
I sense it is this sparrow of a woman the doctor wants; I turn toward her,
repeat the name. Yes, her tiny head bobs. Slowly, she rises
and wobbles her way into the inner office.
I don’t see her again. When my turn comes, I disappear too.
“It doesn’t look like anything,” the doctor says. “The only way
to be sure is to remove it. There will be a scar.”

I decide to watch and wait, the other option she offers,
“not without some risk” as if to emphasize her disapproval of my choice.
When I leave, I am amazed to feel relief though nothing’s been settled.
I feel light, almost translucent, like the skin of the old ones, happy 
with my new willingness to wait. Stepping into the unknown,
life seems so suddenly full
of possibilities.

Previously published in The Power of the Pause (Wising Up Press)



COLPOSCOPY by Lori Levy

Probably normal, the doctor says,
but he wants a tiny piece of my vinegar-flavored
cervix to slide under a microscope—just to be sure.

Biopsy, he says.
Three syllables, neutral as the color beige,
but what I hear is of a darker shade.

Explanations buzz around my head. Some squirm
between my fingers, waiting to be grasped.
Papers to decipher. Charts. On one, I see
a stone wall made of lopsided pebbles,
then realize, as I read the words,
that it’s a diagram of cells:
mild, moderate, or severe
dysplasia. Suddenly,

the room’s too narrow and I’m having
trouble balancing my head.
The white coat tilts the table back
so my head is lower than my vagina.
You can lie there as long as you want, he says.

What if I do?  If I lie here long enough,
saying, biopsy, biopsy, biopsy all day long,
like Dr. Wong, will it begin to sound like something else—
the texture of his voice, perhaps,
when he says, I wouldn’t worry.
Can I reshape the word? Make it look like
the smile in Dr. Wong’s eyes, feel plush as hope
inside my womb?


The Caregiver by Alarie Tennille

I’m wearing a mask 
like I’m part of the medical team.

For the second time 
in three days,
I’m sitting on a gurney, 
watching my blood pressure creep up, up, up
on a monitor 
as I’m prepped
for surgery. Try taking 
deep breaths.
No help.

Then she arrives 
with her I’m here for you smile 
and reassuring hand on my arm. 
“Would you like a warm blanket?”

Nothing short of waving a magic wand
could be better. Why must operating
rooms be icy? She tucks me in.

In my mind, she’s the same nurse
who went through the same steps
48 hours ago, but I know she isn’t.
Slowly and clearly she explains
what will happen next. Asks,
“Any questions?” 

She sees me –
an intelligent human being,
a rational adult who minutes ago
felt like a weepy five-year-old,
but who now wants to show 
this mom surrogate
how brave I can be. 

 
The Doctor’s Tele-Visit by Martha Deed

He did nothing when he could not get through.
Did not ask why.
Sent no text.
Did not care what went wrong.
Did not care his patient did not get
the help he needed.
Marked the visit “No Show.”
Billed $75 for “No Show.”
which he will not collect because
we called.
We found they wrote 8 for 3.
We are nice.  Did not bill for his “No Show.”

Note: This is an 80-syllable poem - a form I invented for my 80th birthday


Just another Oncologist’s Waiting Room, 3/14/2018 by Margaret R. Sáraco

Pi day came and went by me.
Stephen hawking died today. 
Maybe einstein welcomed him
Into stem heaven. 

No tv
No music
In this stark waiting room
Cloth covered, semi comfortable blue chairs
And empty
Listen to one of the “girls”
Talking loudly to patients
Another phones her children
One-by-one, the speak to their mother
Checking on homework
And their health. 
Latch key children safely at home
While mama works
Whispered tones…muffled laughter and…


I fell asleep
Fist holding my head
Losing sense of where I am
I get so nervous these days
Coming to these offices
Staring at sad wall-to-wall worn carpet.
Gold trash cans with plastic liners

A woman coughs, bronchial
Racks and wreck her lungs
While doctors, nurses and staff
Ignore her or just don’t notice.

Like the vet’s office
There is an underlying odor of fear
That will linger on my clothing
And remain in my nostrils for the day into the night. 
My olfactory sense has memory of this place. 
Believe it will take many deep clear 
breaths of cold air to rid me of the fear. 


Even though every bone in her back was broken by Sharon Waller Knutson

Mother refused to allow
the oncologist to pump
caustic chemicals
in her veins that would cause
vomiting and her thick head
of auburn hair to fall out
but she did agree to swallow
the pills that killed the cancer.
Each time the cancer returned
the pills also weakened 
her heart and wakened
her in the night with legs
that ached and paced the floor
until she fainted and fell
and broke her leg
at the age of eighty-eight.
The day she died after surgery
the tests showed the cancer
was in remission again.
.