Beneath the Shroud
…what remains is the removal of the layered white shroud: the only barrier standing between two humans — one dead and the other alive.
Tag: death and dying
Contributing Writer
Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University
Monica is a medical student at the Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, Class of 2026. In 2021, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology and a minor in Art History. She enjoys creative writing, visiting local museums and spending quality time with friends. She hopes to incorporate her passion for narrative medicine into her future career as a physician.
Passed Tense
I wasn’t expecting the morning report. / I wasn’t expecting to see images, / The death, the blood, the open eyes, / the open hands grasping at someone / long gone. Bullets buried deep.
Deceased Note: Facing Death as a Medical Student
I opened their chart and scrolled to the recent notes section. A new title I had never seen before popped on the screen. There, at the top of the chart, “Deceased Note” was written in bold letters.
On Rounds
Because I could not stop for death, / He kindly asked I pause. / My arms were full of sterile wraps, / Scissors, tape, and gauze.
I’ll Call Her Tiffany
Pink playdough littered the exam table, sink, counter and floor. In a flash, a thin child, all elbows and knees, jumped athletically from the sink counter to the exam table and then to the floor, stomping over my feet in the process.
Sensing The Emergency Department
“Three, two, one … lift,” the circulating nurse directs as I raise the patient’s feet from the trauma table onto the recovery bed, gushing with the giddiness of getting to use my hands in a medical setting for the first time.
To Grieve Appropriately
What does it mean to “grieve appropriately?” / To silently cry / as to not break the fragility in the air.
Meditations on Mortality
One of the most powerful paradoxes of medical education is that we learn how to heal the living by dissecting the dead. Our cadavers house the beauty and intricacies of human creation, the distinctiveness yet commonality of each human body and the finality of decline.
Air Hunger
His diseased lungs / stiff like dry clay / function like gills out of the water.
Dying Is Not
Dying is not / as romantic as I once thought. / I think you always knew this.
Souvenirs
Mr. G was a patient I met while on the surgical oncology service. He was in his early 50s, a loving husband and the father of two children. He was the middle sibling with two brothers. He also battled metastatic cancer.
Abrasions, by Morgan Shier, MD
My mother likes to tell the story of how, as a small child, I referred to the superficial wounds sustained in my first head-over-handlebars accident as an “abrasion.” I remember staring at my knee, fascinated by my body’s ability to heal itself. The sacred anatomy of wounds, atoms as spacious as galaxies, coalescing and woven with no instruction of my own to renew what had been lost.
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Ross University School of Medicine
Dr. Morgan Shier, MD is a family medicine physician in Colorado and was one of our first in-Training writers in 2014 and a featured writer in our print book in-Training: Stories from Tomorrow’s Physicians.