Poetry Thursdays is our initiative to highlight poetry and prose by medical students, with a new post every Thursday. If you are interested in contributing or would like to learn more, please contact our editors.
Witnessing the first breath of life, the last before death, “You are cancer free!”, “The cancer has returned,” “Congratulations, you are pregnant!,” “I am so sorry, but there is no longer a heartbeat,” The scream of a mother echoing down the hallway as she brings new life into the world, the scream as she watches her child depart it, Tears of joy in one patient’s room as their scan was clear, tears of sorrow in …
There’s a room down the hall where a woman sits in silence, a shadow of herself, caught between jobs, between her husband’s labored breaths— the shallow rise and fall of waiting. They call it hospice, but only for those whose time they deem nearly spent. Yet her husband, with days stretched tight as thread, fails to meet the protocol, and now he’s slipping through the cracks of criteria, as if life were a ledger to …
Beating the chest, emergency surgery, stopping the bleed, The obvious ways to save a life, that which we all agree. Picture a doctor saving lives–what first comes to mind? The ER doc, the trauma surgeon, surely the first to find. But we often fail to see beyond in more subtle ways, How other doctors save lives through different displays. The patient with chronic back pain, feeling death the only solution, Relieved from misery by a …
we dozed on a mattress rattling overtop the yellow line, dreams buzzing to the arrival of each subway car. how hard we fought to wake together, and walk among hundreds on this cold palate of concrete, between the pointed teeth of buildings, unclear if in these shadows we are sheltered, as mouthbrood roe, or simply waiting, to be consumed. Poetry Thursdays is an initiative that highlights poems by medical students. If you are interested …
I stepped into your home in a short white coat You asked me what year I was in I answered, I asked you how your day was You told me, “it is as good as it gets!” (smiling) As you count down the days I think to myself (nervously) We both are counting down the days But the way you’ve chosen to peer at future days is One I will never forget One we will …
Baby powder, body odor Dark red blood, pale white skin A mother’s cry, a baby’s silence Image Credit: “Baby Feet” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Joseph D’Mello Poetry Thursdays is an initiative that highlights poems by medical students. If you are interested in contributing or would like to learn more, please contact our editors.
This was my patient. I sat with her, held her hand, coaxed her to share pieces of her life story from underneath the covers.
A spoken word piece dedicated to the generous donors and their families of the Donor Body Program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.
Waiting in the snow for the 43, / Mind focused on the cold. / The bitter wind, the bus kneeling
My patient sleeps peacefully. / I wake him guiltily. / I don’t want my face to be the first he sees.
As you search your closet / For your scrub cap, / Stethoscope, / And pants,
I am moving, yet I am going nowhere. I am going nowhere, yet I have come a long way. I do not count how many go by, but each spin demands that I keep moving. With every rotation, I take another step, another leap, one jump on this Earth. These cycles fly by, so much so that I can almost hear them as they whoosh over my head in an instant, making seconds go slow.
Contributing Writer
Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine
Rakan Alshaibi is a medical student at FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine in Miami, Florida, Class of 2026. In 2022, he graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in microbiology and cell sciences. He enjoys writing, jump roping, and watching soccer matches in his free time. Rakan is yet to decide on a career in medicine, but is passionate about global surgery and health equity.
