Medicine makes a lot of demands on those who chose to follow its calling. For most, the personal sacrifices are an unavoidable price that has to be paid. For others, the long hours provide an acceptable excuse for avoiding some of the messier details personal relationships require. This is true not only of medicine, but of any career where 60-80 hour workweeks are not the exceptions but the norm. Hope you all enjoyed the weekend, and had a chance to take a break in order to recharge your batteries. Now, take a moment to reflect on the following Poem of the Week.
Taking charts home after work
The day work not done: into a big bag go charts
that are overstuffed with cholesterols and heart tracings
and spiking sugars from too much icing, and hearts
gone balloony. Charts snooze in the bag, kershuffle, and sing
of lives awry in diagnosis, askew in drug, kerplunk in grief.
I take the bag as homework, heavy in hand, and think
the more you love, the more you lose. And loss isn’t brief.
I write long notes as life’s abbreviations. Kerchink
goes the mechanism of my own care, too brief,
and I wonder what the chief lesson is, and who is chief,
what I can find that is not divine, if there is a link
between the satellite metastases and that reef
hung like noose over falling in love, and these charts
are testaments, manifestoes, omnibuses of broken hearts.
Shane Neilson
Medico Musings 