SPOTLIGHT -
April 22nd 2024
"I pulled my scuffle hoe hard through the clay’s crust and heard the blade scrape metal and earth."
April 19th 2024
"And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold."
April 12th 2024
"I shall forget civilization, I shall forget color, caste, I shall move in a fantastic world of raceless men and women..."
April 5th 2024
"rescued from the filth of paradise, hosed off, shining, my cracked fingernails caked with dirt."
March 29th 2024
"The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded."
Overheard Conversation, ICU
Do I have to speak? I know you know...
Muses
I’ve been waiting for one of those nine bare-breasted sisters to land by my side and inspire a sonnet...
Monarchs and the President
The Monarch’s cortex, head of a pin, contains maps of Earth and heavens within...
Listening to Dead Patients
They love to talk like air traffic controllers: “Angle the spinal needle 20 degrees and push gently toward the midline.” And though I don’t say “Roger”...
Ordinary Mornings
Homeless men in Chinatown doorways flick cigarettes and cough, while a dozen nurses forge into Beach Street winter...
Calling in the Script
Covering for a colleague I begin to startle after the tenth call-med refill requests, side effect questions, and suicidal thoughts...
Psychiatry Comic: Fall Rorschach Test
"Tell me what you see."
The Perfectionist
Rotten teeth, dirt creased face, he’d come in for a hot and a cot and collapsed with DTs...
Psychiatry Comic: Ego Massage
There's ego and there's ego.
The Hills of Paraguay
All summer southwest wind stirs the weeping willows the way my breath disturbs a settled life when I whisper the cancer diagnosis...
Yellow Warbler
Soaked in Mexican sunshine he’s powered back to the Berkshires, all the world’s yellow compressed into a firecracker...
The Tarts
I wanted this to be like a fairy tale walk in the woods before kids, careers, blood clots and bone mets...
Birthday Party
Green hills patched with April, snow and I’ve chosen to celebrate. with a full slate of patients.
The Juggler
After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.
Psychiatry Comic: Anger Management Clinic
When's your teed off time?
We Wrote
We wrote through the night, between moonlight and morning, admissions and discharges, wrote when phones stopped ringing, when pagers stopped paging. We were raw, opening ourselves to chaos and mystery...
Prior Auths
Funny how fast we become prisoners with lost convictions as we fill out the forms, patients getting sicker while they wait.
Wound Healing
My doctor-wife squeezes her needle-nose tweezers and lifts the tiny knots high enough to snip with surgical scissors...
Psychiatry Comic: Holiday Hugs
Please! No more group hugs!
Boogie Child
Our time was Thursday, 5 o’clock, my psychiatrist’s door always opened wide, him wearing a wool sweater, sipping tea, lights dimmed to an endless twilight...
The Pledge
There was combat in Nam and I let my hair grow long, went to college, studied orgo until I became draft exempt...
Musician Injuries
When the soloist lowers her Strad and takes a bow, she reveals the violin’s mark on her throat, which makes me think of Mozart...
Housestaff Haiku
Monday, July 1st...Twenty-two new residents...All with perfect teeth...
Surf Story
I was surfing a long board out past the place where you can still smell Coppertone when a ten foot wave smashed me down into darkness...
Psychiatry Comic: Pathological Resignation
Sometimes it just doesn't pay to fight.
Creativity and Bipolar Disorder: A Fresh Look
People with mood disorders (and those who care about them) are likely to experience a healing reconsideration of their own experiences as they read this book.
Numbers Game
Med school finals, ten backpack pounds of biochem hauled for months, my epiphany: I would never know more about glucose metabolism than that morning...
Psychiatry Comic: Mrs. Freud
Poor Sigmund. Mrs. Freud gave him the slip.
Taking the Pulse
Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down. Always sit down. Then ask for permission...
The Arts and Humanities in Psychiatry . . . A Debut
Creativity should not be seen as “optional” in psychiatry. Rather, it helps us to approach clinical problems in new ways.