Hope, The Best Medicine (2018)
This painting is for patients and those who provide medical care who are in need of inspiration.
This painting is for patients and those who provide medical care who are in need of inspiration.
For Dr. Francois Luks, the pen is mightier than the sword. Armed with ink and a blank pad of paper, he begins to draw out a stomach. With a stroke here and some shading there, he deftly sketches the anastomoses of a procedural resection.
I strode down hallways, winding ‘round to meet / A sailor old and take to him his meal. / A gentle bounce in every step on beat, / This home to many always builds my zeal.
A canvas / Of delicately oiled / Skin, stretched taut
Was it a fall? Did I miss the last step? These things I cannot recall / Hidden from sight, the blood crept from one lone vessel and began to compress / Nice to meet you, one medical student said, as he unzipped my sheath
after three years go by / you appear on two slides / in a lecture / on motor neuron disease
The eye dilated in the physician’s dark exam room, / While into it the eyes of new white coats loom, / From this eye I am learning
Little girl / in the pink hospital gown / sits in a windowless room.
Hepatic failure claimed him mentally, / And colored yellow both his eyes so wide / As too his being stained corporally.
“I used to be an elementary school art teacher in San Francisco.” The more he smiled and the more he spoke, the larger the lump grew in my throat. He wore a grayed t-shirt that matched his unkempt black beard.
His fiancée calls him “The Storyteller.” We sit down outside a cafe during a warm August evening. Still clad in his hospital scrubs, he just finished a shift as a pulmonary/critical care fellow at Rhode Island Hospital.
Where the consciousness floats into the medicine / Where the sacred meets the metal / Where the steel cuts the energy field