The Medical Student’s First Code Blue

   by Joseph Gascho

He’d seen the ugly fibrous patch on the bottom of the ventricle,

hard to the touch, scar from the corpse’s heart attack.

Next year through the microscope he saw the myocytes

crowded out by the fibroblasts that fibrillated the woman’s heart.

And then, third year, through the stethoscope he heard

the lub-dub stop. The code was called, the room filled up with doctors,

nurses, strips of paper running out the little box

that monitored the heart. They told the boy to push

the breastbone in, further in, faster, faster.

He heard a crack, they screamed don’t stop.

But in half an hour they did. Pulled up the sheet. Told the nurse

get the wife. The boy listened as the news was pitched,

watched her grasp the meaning of fibrous plaques and fibroblasts.

Hippocrates Anthology, 2017, p 36. (Commended poem)