The journey to become a cardiologist is long and has many legs. There are the premed days: taking high school Latin because it might help memorize the names of body parts in medical school, college courses in organic chemistry and English literature and the striving for the necessary As, and the critical medical school interviews with curveball questions. Then medical school with the first exposure to the cadaver, enigmatic and charismatic professors, and the first encounter with death. The M.D. obtained, now the stressful and exhausting internship, residency, and additional training as a cardiology fellow. Learning, learning when you know enough, learning to become independent, learning how to “read” a patient, deciding what to do with your life—specialize, if so, in what? And then “the career.” Handling the stress of being “where the buck stops”; the agonizing questioning of self when a patient dies; the juggling of academic life, clinical life, and personal life.

All these are what these poems are about: a journey, a destination—and the realization that there was joy and fulfillment not just in the destination but also the journey, arduous though it was.

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