Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem, "The Killer," recently featured in the issue of Psychiatric Times. Medical students do a rotation in their final, fourth year of medical school that mimics the role once known as an “Internship” (now known as a PGY-1 – postgraduate year one). During this period, there is a lot of supervision and support, but in this poem, the supervision arrived half a day too late.

The Killer

The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets

-William Carlos Williams

She was old and fragile

and I was a just a sub-intern

charged with guiding her care,

her seeing-eye dog in a city hospital.

When I saw a pulse in her jugular vein

I pressed my stethoscope to her chest—

she inhaled and I heard crackles,

like static on a trooper’s radio.

I guessed heart failure.

The answer was pneumonia.

Oh the Chief caught my error the next morning,

dripped in fluids and ampicillin,

but she’d been in bed one day too long,

the clot in her calf broken apart

and trapped in the lattice of her lungs.

I stood by her side, stunned

when her breathing stopped,

and called the Code,

standing like a killer

cornered on a dead-end street,

cops and canines closing in,

thinking confession, still holding my gun.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.