Richard M. Berlin, MD

Sometimes when proposing a treatment plan, I flash to an image of my patient seated beside me on this orchard bench watching orioles court in May’s sharp sunlight...

Dawn is at five, but I sleep past nine, not caring if I miss a few warblers flying home for summer...

That’s how he’d like to go, he tells me, not by this slow seeding of liver and spine, not with all the tears and long good-byes.

The Big Bad Wolf and Wicked Witch liked to creak the stairs by her bedroom door and wake her from dreams calling, “Daddy!”

On the cracked macadam court in the shadow of The Castle on the Hill, below fake gun turrets built with bricks...

I’m driving home from the ER, not ready for sleep, eaten up by memories of my mistakes...

We’ve been meeting since his PSA spiked and he decided on surgery. Radiation finished, nerves nicked by the robot...

After a managed care company calls me to be “a prescriber,” I recall The Book of Dinosaurs my grandfather gave me the day I turned seven.

It's always a brain tumor when I have a headache. “Don’t be crazy,” I tell myself, “You’re just inventing a doctor-mind catastrophe.”

Fifty Shrinks allows us to see ourselves through the sensitive eyes of a colleague and artist.

When I learned my first scale at 45 I knew I would never rip loose and free like the pros who started as teenagers, when time didn’t matter and practicing was just another form of play.

I begin by remembering my hours as a patient and Freud’s “Fundamental Rule”: Say Whatever Comes to Mind...

When I’m hungry, I love to stroll past the campus barnyard and visit the colorful, caged characters who live, like me...

I’d love to create a new set every year, our glossy portraits on one side, caduceus in the corner, honors, cure rates, and publications on the back...

When a full-time writer's husband was diagnosed with cancer, she found writing poetry helped her cope. She guessed that others would, like her, find their experiences with cancer best expressed through poetry. So began The Cancer Poetry Project.

Three years deep in despair, he’s swallowed every pill I prescribed...

Under the V of her cashmere sweater, sacs of silicone sag in tangled scar, their arc of cleavage a triumph...

If I could be edible, I would want to be a steamed vegetable dumpling, pure white like my doctor’s coat…

While I watch the artist paint, I imagine him in the time of plague crafting a portrait of a Medico della Peste, a Plague Doctor wearing an ibis-like mask...

In the graph, bands of color recede like mountain silhouettes drawn by a child...

I never take calls when I'm with a patient, except today when the phone rings from Boston-liver mets on his scan, biopsy tomorrow...

After all the encores at Tanglewood, the only music left is September’s song of crickets scraping their legs for mates...

The sharp steel wall of the concert hall encloses the melody and wounds the summer sky, a soft yellow glow gathering before moonrise...

Outside, the bluestone patio warmed my bare feet, and I smelled Casablanca lilies and honeysuckle we planted last spring.

Before I knew much psychiatry I met his angry stare in the ER, a homeless man with a three day beard...

We climbed concrete ramps from the subway’s underground world, up to the grandstand and my first vision of heaven...

spring-time territory, raucous and free as a New Orleans . . . trumpet, my patient locked-in to the wild tune

But old colleagues said . . . the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart, . . . a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms

I pictured him at his waiting room door . . . clutching a chart, catching eyes, . . . calling out a name, bewildered

I place a stethoscope in my ears and listen to the heart when I’ve run out of things to say.