David Anson Lee

The Hour When Hospitals Tell the Truth

Around two in the morning
hospitals stop pretending.
The day shift optimism fades.
No families in the hallway.
No cheerful volunteers pushing flower carts.
Just the machines
breathing for people
who used to breathe on their own.
A mop bucket squeaks past
like something wounded.
The nurse tells me
the man in 412 keeps pressing the call button
just to hear footsteps.
When I walk in
he’s sitting upright in bed
holding the eye patch we gave him
like it might break.
Doc, he says quietly,
is it still there?
Your vision?
Yeah.
I shine the light.
The retina holds:
thin as wet paper
but holding.
He exhales.
A rancher from West Texas, he tells me.
Still got cattle depending on me.
When I leave the room
the hallway smells of bleach
and burnt coffee.
Somewhere a monitor begins its small alarm,
that stubborn electronic heartbeat.
Every night in this building
someone is trying
very hard
to remain in the world.

What the Wind Knows About the Rez

On Pine Ridge
the wind doesn’t blow.
It arrives.
Straight across the prairie
with nothing to slow it down
for three hundred miles.
The trailer rattles like loose bones.
My uncle sits at the kitchen table
sharpening the same hunting knife
he carried in Vietnam.
You heading back east soon?
he asks.
Boston.
Medical school.
He nods
like he’s turning the idea over in his mouth.
Outside
snow skims across the road
in thin white ghosts.
Must be strange, he says finally,
learning all that medicine
after growing up here.
I don’t answer right away.
Because the truth
is the hardest thing I’ve learned about medicine
isn’t anatomy
or disease.
It’s how many people
don’t see a doctor
until something inside them
is already finished.
My uncle slides the knife into its sheath.
That’s not medicine, he says.
That’s America.

The Question No Doctor Likes

It’s always the last patient
that follows you home.
Everyone else
dissolves into paperwork.
But this one:
a woman
maybe seventy
hands trembling slightly
as she grips the exam chair.
Doctor, she asks,
am I going blind?
The word sits between us.
Macular degeneration.
Slow.
Patient.
Uninterested in hope.
I explain treatments.
Statistics.
The careful language
medicine uses
when it doesn’t have good answers.
She listens.
Then she asks
the real question.
How long
before I can’t see my grandchildren clearly?
Outside the window
the sun is setting
behind the parking garage.
Orange light spills
across the instruments.
Months, I say.
Maybe longer.
She nods.
That’s enough time, she says.
And smiles
the practical smile
of someone deciding
what still matters
before the lights go out.

 

David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. His poems have appeared in Braided Way, The Scarred Tree, Eunoia Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and other journals. He lives in Texas and writes about medicine, memory, and ordinary moments that refuse to be forgotten.