Eugenia Lee is a GP and medical educator in South East London. Her poetry explores the human experience of medicine, general practice and caring for others.
General practice teaches many things
Grief arrives quietly
Hypertension rarely announces itself
And dignity
I have learnt,
Is the first casualty
Of a viral gastroenteritis
When the bowels start their quiet, steady mutiny
Trust dissolves faster than the electrolytes
You begin to lose faith in a sphincter you didn’t realise you had
And the daring gamble of a sneeze, a cough or even a laugh
They never say diarrhoea. They say
‘Doc, it’s not right’.
Each patient becomes a reluctant poet of their bowels
Obsessed with the contents of a toilet bowl
I asked about duration. He answered with textures
A detailed description fit for an artist
I sought symptoms. She answered in colour codes
with the precision of a sommelier
describing Pinot Noir
What is this obsession with food metaphors?
‘Like gravy fleeing a Yorkshire pudding’
‘It was the consistency of pesto’
‘like a chocolate mousse — the cheap ones’
‘suspicious colour like a bearnaise sauce’
The vivid accounts continue
‘Explosive, doctor, truly explosive’
‘I nearly didn’t make it’
Niagara through a paper straw
With such volcanic force
a muddy river after rainfall
And still I push to ask
‘Any blood or mucus?’
As though there is ever a dignified answer.
Somewhere in every NHS surgery
A clinician nods solemnly
At a description of ‘floating fragments’
Whilst internally wondering
How civilisation became this.
You suffered this symphony of A minor and major urgency
Desperate to be witnessed, to share the details
Then comes the sentence every clinician dreads
‘I took photos, would you like to have a look’.
No, no clinician living or yet to come
Has ever thought:
I wish there were pictures.
Featured photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash.
