Psychiatric Times. Vol. 23 No. 4

Good Fathers

Richard Berlin

April 1, 2006

—for James Daniels, MD (1938-2001)

We were three men alone in a ward

room

built for fifty, a film of dust on the

floor,

Dr Daniels and I scrubbed and sterile,
gloved and gowned, standing behind

the patient,

our only light drifting though the dirty

glass windows. I performed the

prep—

Betadine soaked into a sponge,

painting

orange circles on the patient’s back,

the room

filled with the scent of young wine

poured too soon

from the cask. Week after week we

practiced

on anonymous blue-collar veterans,
everything ordered and routine until

that day Dr Daniels pressed the

needle deep
and failed to find the spot, four

times, five,

finally giving up and passing it to

me.

I can still see the angle of the shaft
when I pierced the patient’s skin,

the thin

shadow it cast on his back like a

sundial,

gold droplets of spinal fluid dripping

into a sterile tube, the look Dr

Daniels

flashed me, just like my father's
that day he parked on the shoulder
at rush hour and handed me the

keys.

Dr Berlin is associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Dr Berlin recently established the Gerald F. Berlin Creative Writing Award at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, one of only a few medical student creative writing prizes in the United States.

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Good Fathers

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