Super-Sized Series

Heart, Vagina and Tumor

 

Echocardiogram by Wilda Morris

The monitor magnifies
Mother’s heartbeat.
A black fleck flows
across the green EKG line.

Silently I repeat the rhythmic throbs:
one, two, three, four, 
one, two, three, 
then a glitch.

Black and grey pulse through
ultrasound pictures.
Red, yellow and blue flare
and die down like fires 
of spent passion.

An orange line appears,
measuring velocity,
the cardiographer tells me
as she clicks again,
takes another digital still shot
or momentary movie
of mother’s heart
for the doctor to decode.

Nothing in the pictures to note
the love of a lifetime,
no checklist of children cradled,
comforted, guided into growth,
no inventory of hours
invested in inmates
she visited in jail each week, 
friends or neighbors fed.
No long love line visible.


The Whiney Heiny Blues by Laurie Byro

I do not love thee, Dr. Shlien,
You’re always up in my behind.
I hate to be a bitter whine.
I do not love thee, Dr. Shlien.

I do not love thee, Dr. S.
The reasons why you’re bound to guess.
I tremble in the state “undress”
You waltz around Brooks Brother’s best.

I do not love thee, Dr. Rear,
You poke and prod for what I fear?
Is Josef Mengele waiting near?
You went to Torture U. I hear.
I do not like this Dr. Heiney,
That thing’s so long and I’m so tiny.
Haven’t you reached my eyeballs finally?
I do not like this Dr. Heiney.

I think I’d like you Dr. Shlein.
If just this once you would decline,
And check instead this face of mine.
I’d grow to love you, Dr. Shlein.

Author’s Note: This poem is about my gynecologist. I’ve read it in the hospital to laughter and applause. It makes its poetic debut on Storyteller.


A very pleasant 79-year-old female by Judith Waller Carroll
    
Even my cardiologist 
can’t help remarking on my disposition. 
It’s on record in my patient portal 
along with pulmonary hypertension,
left-ventrical tychardia with numerous 
premature ventricle contractions.

At this stage of my life, mild depression 
would only seem to make good sense,
but cheerfulness is in my DNA
a blessing others may see as a curse,
like the classmate in college 
who asked why I was always smiling.

I had no answer, nor do I today
when every part of my body aches
but still I smile at a tiny pink blossom
on the branch outside my window.
 
The sun, absent for days,
sluices through the half-open shutters,
draping the bedspread  
with silvery ribbons of light.


MRI by Gary D. Grossman

Modern medicine says hello, not with a smile or twinkling eyes, but with a bang loud enough to wrench my head ninety degrees to the left, as if Rowdy Roddy Piper had me in a headlock, while the referee slaps the mat, the count now at eight.  But no, my head is hugged by two expensive plastic braces—penny-level expensive compared to this bedroom-sized multi-million dollar machine, that is making every kind of bang, clang, and soft-tissue image possible. Then there’s the high pitched shriek that I myself would issue, if any utterance was permitted, however, my imperative is to remain motionless as a bullfrog within reach of a hungry great blue heron, and so I just repeat my mantra and loosely clutch the blue squeezy that activates the escape protocol. Wedding ring and Maori jade amulet removed and I’d better ask about the titanium staples that have merged the sections of my lower colon for the last 35 years, because metal is metal, regardless of where it sleeps, and this machine hugs tight to metal as if it were the only lover in the Imaging Center. Loose, comfortable clothing they say, so it’s tee and running shorts—medicine is always cold in both affect and effect, so it’s a long-sleeved tee rather than a shorty. Surprisingly, the tech says after a while your back may grow hot because my back is what I’m here for, well, spine specifically. And I won’t bore your with terms like L4 subluxation and collapsing spinal canal, because I can still walk, even while my nerves fire hot shots through weakened legs to my toes, and it may be that pins and needle soles will be my new story for decade eight, even though a scalpel waits to write the opening paragraph.    

First appeared in Cultural Daily 

Numb-Struck by John Hicks

As the last restraint clicked on my arms, they tightened 
the belts across my chest and waist.  A dark figure rose 
behind the surgery windows.  Leaned forward.  
Overhead speakers, said:     Begin.  

Preparing numbness, an attendant sobbed, 
I can’t face him.  I can’t do it.  
Someone flipped a sheet over my head; 
pink flowers on light blue cotton against 
my nose. A flash of light from the left; 
doors opened; a soft thud 
as they closed. Someone gripped my left arm,
Control: We’re starting now.  
Softer: You’ll feel a slight sting, maybe a chill.

And I did.  As they pumped the dye 
into my arm, it stung; then rushed cold
up into my shoulder.  On my right, a voice read out 
metered progress.  Muted discussion back and forth.  
Control we’re trying again. 

Multiple hands on my left arm. Again    
the sting, the cold. Again the read-out. 
Again the conference.  Someone on the left said, 
We have to get it this time. 
To me, John, we’re going to do it again.  I nodded 
against the sheet; thought of the sack in Fargo.
Control, we’re doing it again. It didn’t take.  

The sting, and they began squeezing my arm like a cake
decorator puckering pink sugar roses.  
I must have floriated the display; they said I could relax.  

Movement around me seemed to pull back, 
then stopped as Doc entered, introduced himself,    
Do you feel this? Or this?  A rustle 
of paper garments; a click of instruments; 
Control commanded:  Stop!  

Beneath the flowers, I tasted salt. 

appeared in Two Cities Review 

 



Two Doctors, a Physical Therapist and a Tumor by Luanne Castle

When I glance up at the malignant spider
against the bone white wall above the couch,
I ought not to startle
like a horse.  Look what happens to them.
But I do.
My right foot in its last painless moment
strikes the carpet, a conductor’s baton
slicing the first shrieking note of agony out of the air.
 
So fitting that this all starts in April—
the month of shoot-outs and bombings
and beginnings like spring.
 
The foot specialist, Dr. B, has student doctors
read my x-ray and examine
the foot of this unstable woman
exaggerating the discomfort
(I can just imagine them conferring about me,
their impressions formed by him)
of plantar fasciitis,
the most common cause of heel pain.
But it’s not my heel.
Exercise it five times a day, you lazy cow.
Dr. B never touches my foot.
 
The year my foot changes my life
is visited by three seasons
in fourteen months.
A year sounds tidier, kinder,
like it might be over and done with.
 
The first season is called Inferno; it’s known as
what the hell happened?
 
In three months
I receive another appointment with Dr. B. 
His PA meets me in my wheelchair.
I’m carrying a symphony in my body,
I tell her.  She looks away.
Woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings
all play their own melodies, each message
more terrifying than the others.
Marshal, a strong man, begs her to ask the doctor
to see my wife for just one minute.
She leaves and comes back to say he will not.
 
In the fifth month
by accident
I go to the emergency room
of a hospital used to unusual cases.
I learn that the foot is a fan
and must be unfurled for an x-ray.
The intern, so young, holds the small bones spread
with his unshielded hands
and there it is:  the tumor which has partaken of
the meat and lives now in the eggshell of the central bone.
 
We can find no report in any medical journal of a tumor in this particular bone.
 
The biopsy handled by a different young doctor
goes bad, the needle inserted in the wrong part of the foot, and the nurse
weeps when she tells my husband how I clung
to her, how we were suctioned by each other’s sweat,
with pain shattering glass planets.
 
We have a recommendation for a surgeon,
and he is far away from us.
How do they stay in business
if they don’t want customers?
They dismiss me into my wheelchair
and we drive from Minnesota to Santa Monica.
Out of seventeen restrooms, only one has handicap access.
My foot is booted in steel and leather for protection,
secured in the footrest of the wheelchair
and between cushions in the car.
 
The last mist of summer settles over Santa Monica
at the end of the continent.
Over the gray beach, the gray water,
the empty pier.
 
My surgeon, I like calling Dr. Eckhardt that.
My surgeon sculpts in expensive materials,
ceramics, polymers, cadaver fibula,
but the one he prizes is my own iliac crest,
although the pain might be worse than the main surgery site.
 
Season two, Purgatorio,
is the long sleep
of the anesthesia, the pain meds, the foot resting in one
cast after another,
and me tethered to the hospital bed in my living room
like a scraggly debarked dog
who has given up and falls asleep at the end of the chain.
 
I wonder how many people have died
in this bed, I say,
and Marshal turns away.
Three—no, four--months of sleep
broken only by meds, light meals, bathroom statistics,
and daily physical therapy visits spent
sitting on the edge of the bed with turquoise light weights
until Anne-Marie the over-qualified PT
is the only person in the magic circle around me.
 
I don’t feel the site of the harvesting
through the cacophony of the foot.
 
Every month we drive to Santa Monica,
my legs out and propped amidst a flurry
of pillows where Dr. Eckhardt examines
x-rays and CT scans of my foot and lungs,
hugs my arch with both his big hands.
He sends me to an orthotics builder, a pulmonologist,
a pain management clinic.
He jokes with me, but not too much.
I say, How long do I need to keep coming here?
For the rest of your life.
 
Paradiso is not the third season.
Or maybe I’m just ungrateful.
Maybe heaven is all relative, like the Yiddish folktale
where the rabbi has the man load up his house
with animals who sound like bad relatives
only to turn them outside so his cottage
feels spacious and comfortable.
 
I am out of the hospital bed and send it back
to the medical supply house for someone else.
Marshal takes the wheelchair
to storage
in case the tumor comes back.
I walk carefully in built-up New Balance shoes the way Anne-Marie
shows me, heels first, rolling through the foot.
 
I try to follow my feet: the left goes in front
and then the right. 
I am not allowed to run,
even to catch the bus or escape a ferocious dog,
or dance to “Doctor Beat” in a spandex unitard.
When can I run, I ask.
Dr. Eckhardt says, Never.
I can’t blame him.
He’s an artist.
I am the museum of his masterpiece.
 
Now, mated to its New Balance,
my foot lets me walk as I need.
Only occasionally does the oboe inside
sound the concert A note,
prompt a tuning against my will.
I continue to visit Santa Monica every season.
Occasionally there is no mist,
and the beach glints under the sun rays.