"The Hotseat"

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem "The Hotseat," about a time in which his hospital’s chief of staff grilled and humiliated a sleep deprived intern in front of the entire group of house staff and medical students.

The Hotseat

O700 and thirty housestaff collapse

like shipwreck survivors.

After 24 sleepless hours

of children renounced by Hygeia,

our eyes are drowned in shadow.

A few nod before he enters

ruddy-faced, rested,

white coat starched and spotless:

Dr. Harry, Chief of the mecca,

diagnostic wizard, the power

who can crush careers with a word.

He slaps a chest film on the light box

and hooks a bleary intern:

Tell me, doctor,

what is the shape of this child’s ears?

Fifteen seconds, thirty, a minute of silence,

sweat weeps from the intern’s forehead.

Harry scorches him with questions

and solves the riddle like Aesculapius,

even kneads the intern’s shoulders

as if soothing a bruise.

We curse him all day, stay awake

all night to earn his love,

and when we descend to Radiology

with our own tame students, we slap

a film on the light box and raise

their first beads of sweat.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.