hour 28

Attending asks my resident mother what she’s grateful for at rounds:

Attending? Her children’s joy. My mother? Her intern.

Attending tells my mother about the other resident who found a bowel obstruction, checked

that surgery would be ASAP, but should have pushed the surgeons more.

My mother heeds the warning, impressed at an hour 22 diagnosis. I listen from her belly.

Patient one looks too thin, hungry for air, hacking up slime; PAGE:

The intern jumps, fishes for a message. He fixes nausea, we lift

a patient’s commode for hints of blood.

Patient two rolls in nonsensical atop his baseline dementia, we turn

him, globs of pus slide over red flesh. We’re deep in the pus, PAGE:

My mother runs to a patient leaving against medical advice, and misses him. He ripped

out his bile tubes and ran. Froth on the floor.

Patient three reeling from drugs scratches an abscess on his arm, shooting juice

at the intern who shielded us despite losing 15 pounds the last two months.

We sweet talk a delirious patient into taking his meds.

Patient four lost his appetite due to a drug side effect, urine concentrated dark orange.

We refuse to give trazodone to patients at hour 22 and we stay up too

Typing through tremor triaging through tachycardia

Attending brings bagels and we throw them through our throats, unsure if hungry or sleepy

apparently it gets better

apparently Socrates was a pimp

“What’s the staining pattern for ANCA glomerulonephritis?” “Pauci-immune.”

The patient had a prerenal AKI and his creatinine dropped 3 to 1 by the morning.

Three patients with dementia watch us from armchairs in the hallway over coffee.

“The horse is dead” the intern texts, his face paper-white against his dark hair

the last attending suggested pointing to as an example of melena.

My mother found our car. Her scrambled shell hurries

me home, browning, pauci-alive.