“I still feel the same,” she says
after three weeks of ECT.
Monday
Wednesday
Friday —
A regimen of electric shocks under anesthesia.
“Your mood today?” I inquire
“So-so,” she replies.
So-so seems better than awful,
I think to myself.
Better than
miserable,
uncomfortable,
I’m being tortured,
I can’t feel anything,
I want to die.
“That sounds different from yesterday,”
I say tentatively,
wondering aloud.
“What do you think?”
Her swift reply comes with twinkling eyes —
“No…”
A smile creeps into her voice,
“I just thought so-so sounded nicer than horrible.”
Her laugh blossoms,
the first green bud on the branch
after a long winter.
Poetry Thursdays is an initiative that highlights poems by medical students and physicians. If you are interested in contributing or would like to learn more, please contact our editors.
Contributing Writer
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Kathryn Norman is a fourth-year medical student at University of Massachusetts Medical School class of 2021. She received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Harvard University in 2015. Before starting medical school, she worked as a CDC Public Health Associate in Modesto, CA, where she discovered her love for both local health policy and hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains.