^© Thomas McGarrity, MD 
Retired, Department of Medicine Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology

You invited me in.
I was excited to join.

We show all the interesting cases Friday morning
For the medical students and doctors in training
A dermatology jamboree
I, a premedical student ravaged by chemo
Violaceous pustules cobbled
My face, my head, trunk and legs
Oral ulcers puffed my cheeks
Studded my lips
My hair like a drunken watchman fell.

Each assigned a stool in an empty classroom.
Please stand. Remove your shirts.
White-coated students like maggots
Swarmed, probed, sampled, pressed, and tugged.
The bow-tied, mustachioed professor
A dandy astride a shiny carousel
Pontificating at each station.

A London circus barker
Exhibiting the elephant man
Both of us ill and breathless
He, by compressing tumors
Me, from contempt.

You invited me in.
I was excited to join.

^© Gianna Dafflisio  |  Class of 2025

I sat beside the windows
so that the sun might excite my skin.
And as my nose filled with sweet lilac,

my gaze stuck

past the dirty glass panes
to the once familiar road,
and I felt each car as it drove by
filled
with purpose
and with people
          on their way
to fulfill meaningful duties
at meaningful places.

While I sat inside an empty house on a Tuesday.

^© Dwayne Morris   |   Office of Medical Education

And I pray this too shall pass
As my faith is greatly tried
There is nowhere to run to
And I no longer wish to hide
I’ve stumbled upon a crossroad
With a clear dividing line
Where surrender must become one with
The healing of my mind
I once thought I ran full circle
But that didn’t make me wise
I simply drug my past into the present
Which told my future lies
Now shrinking in the shadows
Hides a giant playing small
Defeated by his memories
Of once standing strong and tall
As bright as the sun by day
A shining star at night
Oh how I miss that ten year old boy
Not yet corrupted by this life

^© Mary Arguelles   |  Patient

I tried to tell my mother on many occasions that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer. For some reason, the news never took. She would look at me with a blank stare, and then ask my sisters or my brother or even a friend for an explanation. “Now what’s this about Mary?”

That’s when I decided to take the bull by the horns or, perhaps more appropriately, the phony breast by its bogus nipple, and place the matter into our own hands. Seated before her at the Kings Daughters Home where she had recently come to live, I fished out my prosthetic left breast from its pocket within my bra and said, “Hold out your hands.” She readily complied, whereupon I placed the hefty ersatz breast onto her open palms.

“What on earth?”

“I had my left breast removed,” I told her. “Because of cancer.”

She then turned her attention from the alien entity in her hands to gaze into my face and eyes. There followed a silence that tolled like a bell.

She closed her eyes then, and I watched her as she moved her fingertips along the braille of the breast. I placed my hands on top of hers and closed my eyes as well. The softness beneath our hands made me think of a baby’s behind. I wondered how many diapers she had changed by the time I came along. I was her fourth and unexpected child. Had she grown tired of the task by baby number four, or had she become an expert, able to dust and dab retreating baby cheeks in one fell swoop?

She flipped the breast over then, and we simultaneously opened our eyes to view its shimmering underside, still without a word between us. Flipped over, it looked like a jellyfish, washed up on the Jersey shore. I thought about all our summertime trips to the seashore when I was a kid. My mother cooked and cleaned and carted kids to the beach while I ran footloose and fancy free in the sand, on the boardwalk, and across the wrap around porches of St Charles Place.

She flipped the breast over one more time so that it was right side up again in our hands. Together we poked our index fingers into the soft foam. We smiled at each other then, reading each other’s minds as we thought about Nanny’s sugar cake dough, the rising up and the punching down. How soft it was underneath the heel of our hands. My grandmother kneaded it. My mother kneaded it. I kneaded it.  There was a knack to the kneading.

I finally relieved her of the breast, lifted my shirt up, and slipped the form back into its pocket where it could finally quiet down. We held each other’s hands then and said no more.

^© Rachel Casas, MD
    Department of Medicine

My thoughts swim
in a fog of memory,
a timeless suspension
of drifting desires.

Lap after lap until
slowly, a show
of troubled, peering faces
beckon me outside
my walls. And wait.

Frantically searching
the spherical fortress
of my misfiring mind:
Who are these faces?
What do they seek?

Eyes widen, and
gasping
I grasp the surface,
remembering
when time and purpose
obeyed my command.

They slip away.
And I sink
again
to silent stillness.

^© Taylor Goss   |   Class of 2026

Rationing can be defined as
     “the allocation of a good under conditions of scarcity
     which necessarily implies that
     some who want and could benefit
     by that good will not receive it”

Silence seems to be quite scarce these days—
In my head,
     did you lock the door?
     my everyone will die one day
     how do you define love?
     all my friends hate me

In our house,
     an air purifier to block out the thoughts
     the same tv show on repeat to distract me
     fake fireplace sounds in an attempt for calm
    if I talk about it enough, maybe I’ll finally move on

And in the world,
     cars crash and people honk, trying to get to work on time
     gunshots are heard downtown, again
     politicians fight in a never-ending volume contest
    a fire alarm sounds, and no one moves

There never seems to be enough silence,
Yet when we are allocated some,
We always seem to fill it.

^© Anna Serrichio   |  Class of 2025

Sometimes, I miss the psych ward.
To clarify, I don’t miss being sick.
I don’t miss the chaos, the anguish, the despair,
I don’t miss the noise
I miss the quiet …
in my head.

Sometimes, the world is too loud, complicated.
Demands and expectations I can’t meet.
I don’t want to hear all the voices,
I don’t want to hear them tell me
I’d be better off …
if I was dead.

Sometimes, I miss the community, understanding.
The shared experience of being human.
I don’t want to live in a deafening world,
I don’t want everyone talking
and yet no one listens …
to a single word.

Sometimes, the world gets me too scared.
It drowns my words out, and nobody hears.
I miss the safety, I miss the routine,
I miss the reassurance of knowing
my cries for help …
will be heard.

^© Vera Guertler, MD
Formerly PSH Community Medical Group, Lancaster

Everyone is tired of the beggar from Kyiv
   —Anatoly Antonov, Russian Ambassador

Over trampled wheat
under a pale blue sky,
I wander near the border,
no longer mother, doctor, daughter.

Perhaps, I am now part
of the grain
combed by winds
on the fields of Ukraine
dotted with crimson snow?

Or the metal grey river
pulsing between gunshot
ricocheting in a canyon
of skeletal trees?

Maybe I’m the volunteer
offering direction
to those resting
beside roads riddled
with leaves and needles?

Or am I the thread
shorn from frayed
fabric hoping to
weave between slits
of lit windows
on a moonless night?

A beggar from a country
of shriveled wheat
and smoke-choked skies.

Maybe I’m already home
treading between fresh
graves. Thankful for
candles and those
who light them.

I, too, burn
with love
for the broken world.

^© Makayla Lagerman, MD
Clinical Resident  |  Department of Family and Community Medicine 

Hardened
Callous
Cold
Surely, not I.
Bitter
Burnt out
Sold
Surely, not I.
Jaded
In doubt
Bold
Surely, not I.
So when the
Words come
Out my
Mouth,
Surely, not I?