physician honorable mention
Infertility 628.2
By Carrie Link, M.D.
I write poems in an attempt to consolidate my emotions around my role seeing patients and to record my memories of certain encounters.
Poetry conveys the profound experience of working with patients in a way that simply journaling about an encounter does not. For this particular poem, I was struck by the emotional challenges of patients at either end of the reproductive spectrum—those wanting to be pregnant but who are not, and those finding out about an unintended pregnancy. When it became my turn to experience medicine from the patient’s side of the curtain, this poem just happened. It’s my reflection about working with patients around the issue of fertility as well as my personal experience with it.
Carrie Link is a member of the family medicine faculty at Smiley’s Clinic in Minneapolis.
Infertility 628.2
The budding and flowering of spring is here.
The rains have come and cleansed my land of sadness
Nourished me
With possibility
And yet another opportunity,
Bringing guarded hope for this next season.
Seeds are purchased carefully
With too much thought, too much preparation.
They’ve been collected
Inspected
Carefully chosen, selected, some rejected
For the fruits of these labors will be a labor itself.
We abandoned the natural planting
That simple commune with nature.
We adopted science to help us germinate,
Propagate,
So the shoots take root, in a complex chemical reaction that I can illustrate,
But not fully understand.
We must re-examine the growths under the microscope
With a close and attentive eye
For those buds must be appropriately grown,
To be Sown.
The sterile collection, then judicious planting of our own
Selected seeds into an impeccably fertile ground.
Rooting hormone will quicken them
As well as water and so much fertilizer.
Add the warmth and comfort of nurturing sunshine
And time.
Allow the seeds to sprout beneath the earth that’s mine
Where I hold them and wait to check them for 10 more days.
When that anticipated tenth day comes, we will look
For the telltale shoot, the tiny flourishing bud
And again we’ll wait,
Tensely anticipate
A natural disaster that would devastate
Me and this precious potential progeny.
Flooding maybe, a cascade of sanguinous debris.
Or an infestation makes the soil hostile to growth.
Or tornadoes twirl around my long stalks and tangle them
Condemned
To be cut, with surgical precision, from my abdomen
Which could never be planted again.
Only 40 percent of the crop will even survive that first stage.
And then will the crop bear fruit?
Will it be a peaberry, the unusual coffee bean twin
Growing within
Or a lone pineapple fruit that when
Harvested will be the height of sweetness?