“More than any medicine, the poems seemed to blunt Jim’s pain—they were his most effective treatment.” A doctor reflects on his literary bond with a patient.
Jim stopped writing poetry after college. He enlisted when he was twenty-one, and arrived in Vietnam on the second day of the Tet Offensive, working on a team providing intelligence support for the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. Nine years later, he took a job with International Telephone & Telegraph, which allowed him to travel the world on company business, working in the Philippines, Taiwan, and India, and living in Japan.
Our final visit was in June, 2018. I was leaving the V.A. for Columbia University Medical Center, where I was to begin training in infectious diseases. We went through Jim’s list of medications, his upcoming appointments with specialists, and his most recent test results. We reviewed our plan for his pain, which was under pretty good control. Then we took some time to talk about how far we had come. Jim admitted that, when we first met, he didn’t think he would still be alive two years later.
A few weeks later, he e-mailed again. He’d visited a new primary-care doctor at the V.A., and it had gone well. Still, he wrote, “since you left, when I walk in the hospital it’s not the same.” He attached a poem titled “a scene not painted”:Could not hope to translateI learned a lot from Jim about medicine, especially when it comes to treating hospitalized, critically ill patients. I often meet people after a severe infection has ravaged their bodies.
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