Photo credit: Five Buck Photos/iStock

White Coat Lies

Rain in November deepens depression,
worsens all joint pain. On a scale of one
to ten it’s an eight. The waiting room
is full of dripping umbrellas.

I walk to the front desk. The waiting
woman sees me.  Even my stethoscope
disguise, my averted gaze won’t deter her.
She asks for minutes of my time.

I tell her I can’t talk now.
I’m with another patient. I fear the request
for a disability letter, an opiate prescription.
She doesn’t argue with my authority.

My bright blue computer screen waits
to finish my progress note. I like days
when I keep up. I like days when I’m done
before the building closes, before

the sliding doors lock. After six, no one
can come in, no one can get out, except
by the panic bar door. The security guards
frown, stare at gray video monitors.

I smile at them as I leave.
The asphalt lot looks different in the dark,
gates raised for the night. Open umbrellas
get blown inside out by the wind.

About This Poem:

• This poem was published in U.S. 1 Worksheets in 2021.
• I wrote this in a moment of feeling crushed under my workload. The demands of my job made me less empathetic. It’s a depiction of the difficulties physicians have with setting boundaries, with prioritizing their own lives over the lives of the patients who depend on them.
• There’s been discussion in the past few years in the medical literature about physician burnout and moral injury.
• Sometimes, the best response is to write a poem about how you feel, to let the interplay of words and images portray the complexity of the emotion.