CMAJ • October 12, 2004; 171 (8). doi:10.1503/cmaj.1021680.
© 2004 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
All editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the Canadian Medical Association.
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The Left Atrium
Côté cœur

[poem - no department]

Song of the ICU resident

Shane Neilson

Family Physician Oromocto, NB

The intravenous lines slung low
over a broken-down chariot,
the effluent of a bed-ridden man
drained by plastic tubes
to the tune of sedate monitors
bleeping death, death.
In the ICU I think instead of life:
a pot roast, a beach ball, my wife,
this belt (too tight);
the chore of lab results
waiting to be interpreted,
the stacks of old charts that must be read,
my list of things to do in hospital
couples with another list:
pick up milk, get butter,
watch ER tonight.

My man breathes at the short end
of a tracheotomy and is transfused,
Veach of his organs owned by a subspecialty.
On rounds, the attending asks:
Has he been consulted to the mortician yet?
As we work, the ward clerk
calls out phone lines like bingo numbers:
Cardiology on seventy-six-fifty, Thoracics on
sixty-nine-hundred, General Surgery on
seventy-two-hundred.
Residents blink at one another
bleary-eyed, our patients splayed
before us like toppled dominoes
that will not right again.
Mechanized beds with push-button pulleys
sound elegiac whirrs as Trendelenburg is reversed,
as patients are turned and cleaned as if on a rotisserie.
My man, a long-distance hauler
who fell twenty feet from atop his cab last week
will never again strut to his truck.
All his subsequent breaths
will have the ventilator's pressurized
hiss and suck.

Or there may be no more breaths:
last night his wife asked that we stop.
Just stop.
I added her request to my list,
knowing that I will be the one
to disconnect the lines that droop,
that this afternoon I will watch him gasp
and stop
as she weeps in the quiet room.

Shane Neilson

Family Physician

Oromocto, NB





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