Lab Oratory

I want to bleed words onto the page, exsanguinate
all that is within me, but the shock I feel is a
tourniquet restricting the flow of thoughts,
leaving me numb and far from sanguine –
My patient lies in a hospital bed alone,
her platelet counts so low
that she could bleed to death.
I meditate in the office alone,
after a long day of sifting through
laboratory results and cancer clinical trial protocols,
thinking of the long night that she has ahead.
I think too of the poems that she has written
and read to me about her cancer journey,
each word a pulsing declaration of existence,
each verse a lifeline. How exquisite
that the body can be broken and then healed
by our own words. These musings begin to
liberate the muse within me, and I yearn
for nothing more than to write alongside her.
I envision us – me, her, and all members of our health care team –
crafting an “exquisite corpse” poem together:
each person contributing a line to the body
of work, rejoicing in a shared human narrative
being born from our laboratory of ideas.

Emancipation

The caretakers say she has Parkinson’s.
They speak in fake, lugubrious tones,
bitter honey dripping from their tongues
into a sea of tired sighs and indifference.
They leave me alone to “deal” with her,
as if such a verb could ever be applied
to a person so helpless,
alone,
and afraid.
She beckons me close,
and places a tiny bottle in my hands: Nail polish.
It is a shade so incarnadine, so rich and lurid,
that her hands quiver at the sight of the color.
I place the brush on her immaculate nails and begin to paint,
and she closes her eyes, drifting back to the days of insouciance and joy.
But then a cry of passion escapes her desiccated lips,
her eyes darken, her fingers tighten around my wrist in a tenacious embrace.
She points one finger to the horizon, shaking violently,
and throws both hands in front of her while calling out in painful murmurs.
In that fleeting moment, I do not see a woman with dopamine deprived cells,
but a woman of Amazonian strength,
a vivacious spirit trapped behind bars,
beckoning and beckoning the demons to emancipate her from her misery.
I pull her towards me and wrap my arms around her,
until the tempest is replaced by halcyon weather like no other.
Minutes pass by, and she leans towards me and whispers
“Thank you.”
And I am glad,
to have given her temporary emancipation,
with the simplest of hugs.

Alice Ranjan is a clinical research coordinator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA. She graduated from the University of Washington-Seattle, where she received a B.S. in Microbiology, B.S. in Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology, and a minor in English. During her time there, she served as a founding member and editor-in-chief of Capillaries Journal, a publication that includes written and art works on health, illness, and healing, as well as academic pieces on public/global health issues. She has also worked as a cancer research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and aspires to combine medicine, clinical research, and the arts in her future career.