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Clammy are my hands squirming inside latex gloves,
Picking at zigzag wrinkles
Cascading down ill-fitting scrub pants.
Under trimmed bangs, my wide eyes peer out
Through safety goggles one exhalation away
From a blanket of condensation.
My mask—it obscures both my frozen smile
And the heart in my throat.
Every third of an hour in the geriatric clinic,
A cleaned room seats a new, frail,
Patient in the flesh.
Their hands, gripping sheets of written griefs,
Refrain from shaking mine
As they ready to recount the reasons
They dared break strict isolation
For these precious minutes
With not their loved ones,
But a tremulous trainee.
I should have shriveled from pure unworthiness
When the dainty lady recessed in the corner chair,
With her reading glasses and notebook ready,
Ignored the first half of my introduction as Student Doctor
And waved off my stammered correction with,
“You’re a full doctor to me.”
Yet in an instant, my back stood straighter
The light at the end of the tunnel shone brighter
The gut-wrenching, heart-rending,
Learning moments of school nights past
Slackened their fierce grip around my lungs,
And my throat buried deep the primal scream
That so often punctuates twilight-hour studying.
As the two-syllable melody of doctor
Swelled my chest
And ricocheted in my eardrums,
I carefully harbored them within every muscle of my being
For the longest of nights and days to come.
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Li, I. Semantics. J Med Humanit 43, 519–520 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09741-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-022-09741-6