Medical Poems

[Nick Capozzoli]

I've have a fairly large collection of poems that I've written over the past 30 years. Thanks to MS Word and PC's I've been able to save and work on this stuff. This is fairly neat.

I've posted a few poems on LitNet (mainly "translations") but I'd like to post more stuff. Here's one on a medical topic. I've got a few more if there is any interest.

Wernicke-Korsakoff

You woke from surgery confused. DT’s
For three days. Snowed on Valium, you spoke
Of Dublin’s trees and called on Jesus’
Mother to forgive your sins.
Despite the yellow bag of vitamins
We poured into your veins, thiamine
Found the crucial neurons dead
That once contained your memory.
You live now only momently,
Confabulate to fill the gaps
Your recollection can no longer bridge.
Yet there is that which you remember well
Buried deep within the brain:
Your fire-haired bride of thirty years ago.
But when she comes to you again,
Just who she is you cannot tell.

[AuntShecky]

You don't have to use an upper-case letter the first word of each line. That's a rule from the 18th and 19th centuries which free verse more or less made irrelevant. Punctuate and capitalize lines of verse the same way you would with prose, such as capitalizing the first word in a sentence.

"Confabulate"-- a $50 word not even doctors would use (unless they were trying to impress somebody.)

Despite all that, the closing five lines pack a helluva punch.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Thanks!

"Confabulate" is, in fact, the clinical term we use to describe what patients with Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome do to compensate for their memory impairment, and such confabulation is one of the main diagnostic hallmarks of the syndrome. I wrote that poem back in the 1980's when I was a medical student and it describes an actual patient I cared for on the hospital wards. I tried to be as accurate as possible. The "yellow bag of vitamins," for example, refers to the IV "cocktail" that we administered in the ER to patients who were experiencing DT's. This IV bag was made up of saline solution to which was added thiamine and other vitamins and electrolytes (which tinged it yellow). For that reason we often referred to it (and still do) as a "banana bag."

I appreciate your comments on the capitalization of the words at the beginning of each line, but I chose to write it that way. I'm not sure that free verse makes such orthography entirely irrelevant. And I'm not sure that my poem is "free verse." It certainly isn't accentual/syllabic, but there are features (such as rhyming) and I didn't think I was writing "free verse."

[Hawkman]

Clinical accuracy is all very well, but it doesn't really do the poem any favours. Do we really need to know which clinical drugs have been used and confabulate is a clumsy almost comical word which detracts from the gravitas of the subject. and why "snowed"? it conjures an image of cocaine. I'm not sure that momently is such a great word either. Momentarily pretty much means the same thing in context and scans better, though I can also see why you would not want to use it. This is one occasion where perhaps saying, "moment by moment" would have been more expressive and lyrical.

However, the subject is a moving one and there is good observation and compassion in the piece. As Aunty says the last few lines are very powerful.

Live and be well - H

[Nick Capozzoli]

Clinical accuracy is all very well, but it doesn't really do the poem any favours. Do we really need to know which clinical drugs have been used and confabulate is a clumsy almost comical word which detracts from the gravitas of the subject. and why "snowed"? it conjures an image of cocaine. I'm not sure that momently is such a great word either. Momentarily pretty much means the same thing in context and scans better, though I can also see why you would not want to use it. This is one occasion where perhaps saying, "moment by moment" would have been more expressive and lyrical.

However, the subject is a moving one and there is good observation and compassion in the piece. As Aunty says the last few lines are very powerful.

Live and be well - H

Hawkman,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. By "momently" I meant not "momentarily" but rather that the patient, because of his memory disorder, was experiencing the world "one moment at a time." That is what happens with WK amnesia. There is a movie, Memento, whose protagonist suffers from precisely this sort of amnesia. I chose "momently" because it seemed to me to be the best word I could find to describe what the patient was experiencing, far better than "moment by moment" would have done.

"Snowed" was chosen because that described the sedative effect of the Valium we gave him. Cocaine is a stimulant, sometimes referred to as "snow," but we don't call folks under the influence of cocaine or other stimulants as "snowed," which refers to being sedated by opiates, alcohol, or other sedative/hypnotic drugs.

I guess from the responses I've gotten that readers have a problem with "confabulate." I'm sorry folks feel that way about it, but I will stick with that word for the reasons I mentioned above.

I appreciate the criticisms. Thanks!