Claudia P. Rodriguez, MD

“I saw your rise, and missed your fall. I couldn’t have caught you if I tried…”

As clinicians, we can only imagine what happens when patients terminate treatment. Thoughts from an addiction psychiatry fellow.

In a world in which substance use disorders are no longer suffered in isolation, treating addiction is a challenging journey with obstacles, intermittent failures, and life-altering successes. A poem on drug withdrawal expressed through the eyes of a fellow in addiction medicine.

We do not have to set time aside to do something that helps validate our experience, while simultaneously coping with it. The lesson expressed in this psychiatry resident's poem.