Echo Poems
61 M, Systolic Click, BAV
Whoever sent you for this test
Was smart to think the sound she heard
Was from a malformed valve:
Two cusps instead of three.
She’ll tell you when you see her next
About what lies ahead:
In fifteen years or so,
An artificial valve.
But will she tell you that the pipe
Beyond the valve
Could crack at any time?
She will not know just what you want to
know.
Some facts I wish I didn’t know, like you.
My valve’s bicuspid too.
Suicide and the Gift of Life
She shot herself,
gun barrel to chin,
aimed up and back.
Surer ways to do
what she had mind to do
when she had mind.
Her heart beats fine,
unaware there is no need
to feed her mangled brain with blood.
Good enough that someone kept alive
by pumps and drugs
will get another chance.
Had she known
it might have changed her mind.
Or then again
it may have made her finally smile.
43F, Left Atrial Myxoma
Ripe peach,
dangling down,
two weeks late:
will some farmer-doctor
through cut
through chest
pluck it off in time
or will the slender stem
snap tonight?
Medical Examination Before the Football Season
The doc runs through the guards
and ends and monsters on the line
in fifteen minutes time.
He tells the quarterback to stand,
then squat, then lie back down again,
cold disk of stethoscope
pressed against the chest
as he listens, listens
to the whishing sound
of blood that slaps against
a wall of muscle jutting out
into the ventricle
and now the boy worries
not about his heart
that could fibrillate
away his life at any time
but that he’ll never
throw a pass again.
Palpitations
She thinks this flipping and flopping
is her heart about to break,
that she will drop like dad at 45.
What we doctors fret about
are aching chests, swollen legs,
breath
that’s gone in twenty steps.
We pat her on the head,
send her back to work, think
to ourselves, go get a life.
But tonight awake in my bed
when the clock tolls two
some demon may jump
from my breast bone to
my Adam’s apple
and beat his drums wildly,
and I will think
it is the end.
34F, VAD
Despite his vest
the 32
took your father
through the chest.
They pierced your apex
and jammed
this pump inside,
a thousand times as big.
You live.
…….
VAD: ventricular assist device