John West is a Melbourne nurse and prolific poet. Such a writer may give us helpful insights into an area of health care we might otherwise be tempted to ignore (at our peril). Studying the poems of other health care workers may help us maintain good relations with them.

from Portraits.

3. A Chinese Man in a Bed 

Approaching him, holding his pills

I think how alike all old men are

taking up as little space as possible

missing their wives and children, their grandchildren

reading their newspapers over and over again

their false teeth always drooping as they snooze

off and on; throughout the afternoon

waiting for that visitor, that meal, that cup of tea

giving a little start when the nurse

taps them on the arm and hands them

another cup of pills.

 

In his book ‘All I ever wanted was a window’, there are several poems on his alcoholic/psychiatric self in middle age: 

First AA Meeting            

I can see them at the door, smoking

drinking coffee from styrene cups.

 

I want to be anywhere but here,

home writing down this poem,

 

Walking back along this street,

admiring the bodies of women

 

not at this meeting

not at the mercy of truth.

 

West has a number of poems about nursing care, especially on the longer-term geriatric and psychiatric wards. His verse is direct and uses simple words and phrases to communicate profound observation. 

May Johnson 

One nurse volunteers to sit with her because she’s done it once

before. She misses most of the handover because they wheel the girl

in just after ten o’clock. She is in a single room and we go in with

the morphine and largactil every hour; she doesn’t speak while I

am in there, just stares at the ceiling; I can still smell the kerosene.

Someone takes in the dose for three am but she doesn’t need it so

we let the nurse have a half hour break and when she comes back

she wants to help to prepare the body. “I’ve never laid anyone out

before,” she says, and then she tries to laugh.

 

Consider: How passé is a debate on free or blank verse, versus strictly structured rhyming verse? The first practitioner of blank verse in English was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Earl Marshal of England, in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the 1540’s. People still get passionate about this subject!

 

Saxby Pridmore 

Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Tasmania, Pridmore is an unusual poet in so far as he has published over 200 poems in the literary press but never released a book. The following poem is remarkable for its subject matter and its intensity of honest feeling: 

Caught on the Hop 

You came into my house, unannounced.

We talked of school days

our second marriages, then

it got around to what we had been doing lately.

 

Without warning, you pulled up your shirt

to show

where they cut you in half to put in

the lungs of a teenage boy.

 

I was angry with you for frightening me

for being the centre of attention

for doing something I'd never done

for the teenage boy.

 

You should have given me warning.

We hadn't been introduced. Suddenly

there was a strange

pair of lungs bellowing in my living room

 

with you, grinning

between immuno-suppressed cheeks.

I didn't want you to cough or spit

I didn't want to breathe your expelled air.

 

I didn't know whose lungs you had

or how his family felt about you being there.

I am an average man

ashamed of not being good with the unfamiliar.

 

Here’s a salutary reminder of the difficulties faced by clinicians who work with the mind: 

Influence 

This episode of illness starts unremarkably

apparently refreshed, your voices shout

some new insults into your ears, out

to the sides grey people move, to whip

away, when you try confronting them.

I increase your medication.

 

The trajectory goes wrong. You’re not

as sad as you should be, in the face

of voices. I do your bloods again.

Another scan shows fine grained

something, of important insignificance.

Then you explain, you’re having an affair.

 

Consider: Has it happened to you that your pre-conceptions of someone’s illness have been misguided?            What is the risk inherent in preconception? How can a doctor avoid forming preconceptions? 

 

References and Further Reading 

West, John (2002) All I ever wanted was a window              Pardalote 

Pridmore, Saxby: numerous works in numerous journals which can be searched on the AustLit database