55-Word Stories

Before walking out of the patient’s room, I bowed and spread my hands out, signifying respect and a thankfulness for one’s presence in our culture.

White coats may be sacred robes. The lab hums—a quiet reverence. Each step, precisely measured, seeking truth.

In the quiet of late nights, I juggle

work, motherhood, graduate studies.

From my abdomen was speech for thine ear.

Vacationing in the Caribbean, I was afflicted by intense tooth pain.

Spotify plays his favorite song.

Through Bluetooth the song is streamed to the external cochlear implant processor.

To clarify:
dizziness means nothing.

He tells me his name but to every other question his answer is the same: a smile, a shrug of the shoulders, and an uncertain laugh. 

My first AIDS patient. The 80s. Lots of fear. Misunderstanding. I hoped he could not see the horror on my face.

Bad news has a way of darting in, late on a Friday afternoon, ducking around the corner of the heavy, carved wooden doors as they are swinging shut, closing out the week and thwarting the ability to respond until Monday morning.

She watched her muscles twitch, small flickers disturbing the skin surface like ripples on water. 

Random, unprovoked, without beauty.

Today was the first time that I really saw my father as old.

            Never young, never gray, to me he was just “Dad”.

My father said to my mother “We are moving to Nebraska.”

She answered no, but we moved to Nebraska anyway!

In India, names are given based on their meaning. 

The echocardiogram came back. His heart was so big it could barely beat: dilated cardiomyopathy. 

“He’ll be lucky to make it to Little Rock alive.”

When she was a teenager in the 1940s, Marie loved going to the neighborhood theater to gaze in rapture at Gene Tierney, her favorite actress.

Back stooped, feet shuffling. Hands trembling, rolling imaginary pills. 

His wife follows, smaller at each visit, struggling.

You’re circling the drain.

You know you are.

When we finally had a backyard there was no time to watch the stars at night. The day ran fast tiring us and the night dropped quickly.

Smile and knock — enter when permitted.
Shaky and washing my hands.
“What brings you in today?”

I worried…. despite her insistence that she was “just fine.” And now my heart aches with things unsaid. 

They come, in shifts— through side entrances, private doors…. most

wearing comfortable, expensive shoes, color-matched pants and tops

squeezing-in last minute family talk, world business…. on cell phones.

“What will it do, kill me?”  

Said a wearied coal miner 

Who caught me eyeing the tobacco smoke

medical student.

the pager beeps

it is a race to the trauma call.

She comes into my clinic, a stranger, and tells me she has cancer.

Europe’s been burning, Pakistan is drowning, but I’m only one person, so how can I make a difference?

“I sense intruders.”

“Are you sure?  Windows closed.   Doors shut.”

Enter a hospital, you’ve entered a different world.

I cannot transplant your heart.
I cannot cure your cancer.
I cannot stop death.
But,

I haven’t seen death. Formaldehyde nostalgia. Different specimens.
Organisms are human.

Just go in and out of the patient’s room
Don’t let anyone know you are nervous.

The home I left is a fresh tattoo: a throb at night, of longing.

Living a pandemic.
Loss. Jobs, people, freedoms.

They “function” only to see, yet…

On top of the overgrown milkweed, a single monarch
butterfly searches for a bloom, or nibbles on the leaf, or
perhaps deposits one egg.

January 2020 biopsy
What’s the verdict?

What if my grandma were still alive?

I sit in the back office seeing patients through a video camera, safe.

I imagine myself visiting a lab. While there, I probed into the psyche – if there ever was one – of a coronavirus.