Lines, tubes, wires, chains.
Dignity stripped, cavities drained.
The metronome of your pulse above
the beeping orchestra, dissonant buzz.
Each gesture tracked, beat recorded,
breathing measured, life distorted.
Do you still feel free?
The body, its function a masterpiece to muse,
altered by poison, fluid infused.
Vesicles, vessels, organs affixed,
shrouded in blood, lymph intermixed.
Adhered in oneness by tendon and skin,
scarcely quickened by a pump grown dim.
Do you still feel strong?
Risen before the dawning sun,
a swarm of stoic white has come
to declare the status of your issues–
Liver, kidney, heart, lung, tissue.
To examine and prod, inspect then move
a person, a soul, or a number to improve?
I hope you still feel human.
Categories: All Poetry, Medical Poetry, Medicine, Poetry by Phoebe
![Living [a poem]](https://i0.wp.com/healthinspiration.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nature-poem.jpg?fit=1000%2C631&ssl=1&resize=40%2C40){kind=small}
Precise, though economic, description. The rhetorical questions at the end of each stanza may sound ironic (who, under such conditions, could answer them? Do they have an answer? Is an answer expected?) Dood for thought! Very well-written.
Jim
Wonderful compassion in your poem. I haven’t ever been in the ICU but whenever I feel the humanness between me and a physician I am grateful. <3
ICU is a scary place ,I wish that all of us eat well ,exercise and stay away from drugs and alcohol and be careful while travelling ,so that we need not to visit ICU
Very true. 🙂
A beautiful poem, Phoebe. So interesting to read a doctor’s POV on the I.C.U. setting. And that artwork — gorgeous!