My Doctor Prescribed a Poem
Under the medicines, in the same handwriting: a title and an author.
The prescription had three lines. The first two were medicines I could not pronounce, and the third, in the same rushed blue ink, said: The Peace of Wild Things. Wendell Berry. Twice daily, after food.
I handed the slip to the pharmacist the way you hand over anything a doctor gives you, without really reading it. He scanned the shelves behind him, squinted at the paper, then at me. "We have the first two," he said. "The third one you will have to fill somewhere else."
Let me back up.
That was the winter my mother had her bypass surgery, and my own heart, out of what I can only describe as solidarity, began misfiring. Twice I drove myself to the emergency room at two in the morning, certain I was dying. Twice a tired resident looked at my ECG and told me my heart was structurally perfect. "Panic," the second one said, not unkindly, peeling the sticky electrodes off my chest. "You should see someone."
The someone I saw was Dr. Verghese, because he was the someone my family had seen for thirty years. His clinic sat above a bakery, so the waiting room always smelled like antiseptic and warm bread at the same time, which is the closest a smell has ever come to describing childhood.
He was seventy-something, wore the same grey cardigan in every season, and kept a fish tank with exactly one fish in it, a fat goldfish named after a cricketer who retired before I was born.
He took my blood pressure. He listened to my chest for a long time, longer than the machines had.
Then he asked me questions no machine had asked.
"When did you last sleep past six without waking?"
I couldn't remember...
"What did you love doing when you were fifteen?"
I laughed, because it seemed irrelevant, and then answered, because he waited. "I used to write. Poems, mostly. Terrible ones."
He nodded slowly, the way he nodded at lab reports, like I had just handed him clinical data. Then he pulled his pad toward him and wrote the three lines.
"The first is for your blood pressure," he said, capping his pen. "The second is for sleep, short term only, I am not giving you more. The third is for the thing the first two cannot reach. Twice daily. I am serious. After food, because you skip meals when you read on an empty stomach and then blame the words."
I thought it was a joke. A charming, old-man joke, the kind you tell your friends about later.
I paid, collected the two boxes of actual medicine, and forgot about the third line until I was sitting in the hospital parking garage three days later, waiting to visit my mother, too early for visiting hours and too wired to sit still. I found the slip folded in my wallet and typed the title into my phone.
I read the poem once, quickly, the way you read anything on a screen. Fine, I thought... Nice. Birds, water, a man lying down in the dark because he is afraid for the world. Very nice.
Then at 3 a.m. that night, awake again, hand on my own chest counting beats, I read it a second time, out loud, in the kitchen, in the dark, and something in the back of my ribs unclenched.
Not dramatically... It was less like a pill and more like a window someone had opened two floors down; I couldn't see it, but the air in the whole house changed.
Twice daily, he'd said. So I did it. I am a rule follower when I'm frightened. Morning and night, after food, I read a dead farmer's twelve lines about herons like other people take statins.
Here is the part I still don't fully understand: my heart quieted.
The medicines did their part, I'm sure, and my mother's recovery did more. But the panic, the 3 a.m. certainty of doom, that was handled by the third line. When I went back for a follow-up, I told him it was working and asked, half joking, if I could get a refill.
He wrote me Wild Geese. The visit after that, Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye, with a note in the margin: "only after a bad day, this one is strong."
Something else happened that winter that I didn't tell him about, not at first. I started writing again. Terribly, exactly as advertised. I wrote a poem about the scar down my mother's sternum, how it looked like a seam, like someone had opened her to check the stitching of her and closed her back up satisfied. I read everything I could find about healing, trying to learn how other people wrote about bodies without flinching. Eventually, hands actually shaking, I posted the scar poem on a community wall for poets, where strangers were gentler with it than I had been. Months later I entered a better one into a monthly poetry contest, which felt less like ambition and more like reporting back to the pharmacy: the treatment is working, see attached.
Last spring, I went to tell Dr. Verghese all of this. I climbed the stairs above the bakery and found the clinic dark, a printed notice taped inside the glass.
He had died in February.
Quietly, at home, the way he probably prescribed it for himself.
His receptionist, Meena, who had worked that front desk since before I existed, was still coming in on Saturdays to close things down. When I told her about my three-line prescription she didn't look surprised. She went into his office and came back with a shoebox.
It was full of poems. Photocopies, torn-out pages, index cards, a napkin. Patients had been mailing them back for decades, with notes. "This one got me through chemo, give it to someone who needs it." "Read at my father's funeral. Thank you, doctor." Forty years of returned prescriptions.
At the bottom of the box, in a plastic sleeve, was the oldest one. A patient's handwriting this time, spidery and faint, on the back of an appointment card from 1989. It was a stanza of Tagore, copied out for him, with a line beneath it: "For the doctor, after his wife. One reading at night, more if needed. You looked after us. Let this look after you."
He hadn't invented the treatment. He had received it first.
He treated what the scans could see with the first two lines, and what only the dark could see with the third.
Meena let me keep one napkin poem. I left the box, because it belonged to the room.
I think about how easily he could have just referred me onward, which would also have been correct. Instead he looked at a frightened thirty-four-year-old counting his own heartbeats and understood that some prescriptions have to be written in a language the body doesn't speak.
Last month a friend of mine was in hospital for a week, nothing fatal, everything frightening. I sent flowers because that's what you do. But on the card, under the get-well wishes, in my own rushed blue ink, I wrote a title and an author. Twice daily, I wrote. After food.
The original slip is still in my copy of Berry, doing duty as a bookmark. The ink is fading now... You can barely make out the medicines.
The dosage is still perfectly legible.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.