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 be balanced, a calculation of who deserves care.
He has no health insurance.
In one sentence, he becomes less,
his body no longer a patient,
just another burden she shoulders alone,
and her shoulders droop
under the weight of each breath he takes.
Their home is heavy with silence.
The walls lean inward, close like hands clasped
around what little they have.
Bills stack up, indifferent and immovable,
cold as any diagnosis.
She is his caretaker, bound by love
and the hollowed-out ache of helplessness.
But there is no cure
for the emptiness eating at her heart.
She feels trapped, unseen, a ghost
to neighbors, a stranger in the streets,
invisible to a system built on numbers
and checkmarks, on forms she cannot fill
with her grief, with her fear,
with her pleading eyes and calloused hands.
Depression curls around her like fog,
heavy, stifling, an invisible hand pressing down.
It tells her she is alone in this labyrinth,
where the exits are illusions,
and even hope has given up in this chase.
She does not speak of it,
not to him, not to anyone,
because to name it would be to admit
that even she doesn’t know the way out.
And we—the ones meant to heal, to fix—
find ourselves in rooms like this,
where care slips beyond our grasp,
where solutions are not found in textbooks or rounds,
and our hands come up empty, fists of resolve loosening
in quiet resignation, in the ache of witnessing.
These are the spaces between our oaths,
the places where our calloused hearts wear thin,
where we turn to each other, our colleagues,
and speak in whispers, in looks heavy with shared sorrow.
We cannot fix this alone, cannot leave them
in the hollow spaces where systems fail.
Some patients are more than cases—
they’re mirrors, reflecting what we dare not face.
We can do better than this hollow ache of inaction.
May we find the courage
to build something kinder, to bridge these chasms
before another life slips through,
unseen.
Let us gather strength, resolve,
not just to treat, but to
truly see.
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.
Vanessa Kady is a fourth year medical student at Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine in Miami, FL Class of 2026. In 2019, she graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor of Science in health sciences and minor in psychology. She enjoys working out, reading, and the beach in her free time. After graduating medical school, Vanessa would like to pursue a career in family medicine.