On
“The Crash Room”
By
Kelley J. White
THE
CRASH ROOM
here
is where I run in slow motion
clipboard
as shield keys clanking
stethoscope
banging breast with each beat
chanting
the mantra of resuscitation: adrenalin
bretylium
bicarbonate dopamine
and
the door has flung open on a child
seizing
a child
bleeding
a child whose shoulders convulse
with
electroconversion shock
a
child burned a child
crushed
a child struck torn broken fixed
pupils
pinpoint dulled eyes swollen shut shut
and
I will be the one at the ankle
threading
a line
the
one pushing chest
the
one counting with an ear at the mouth
the
one cutting
clothes
the one pushing tubes
the
one standing on the ceiling
watching
her
spirit
thrown
—Poet
Lore
Vol. 97, No. 3/4
This
is the urgency of Code Blue. Doctor Stat. Arrest. I was twenty-five years old,
an intern in a crumbling inner-city hospital in a crumbling neighborhood in
North Philadelphia. I’d chosen St. Christopher’s for its smiling apple logo and
a fleeting sense that my peers would support me; that I just might be able to
survive a three-year residency and then begin a life; that a dozen of us—new
doctors in training, each issued two sets of scrubs, proud of not sleeping,
arrogant with our beepers and bloodied shoes, clutching our cold coffee on
rounds—could invent together a better way to fix lives. I was terrified. I was
exhausted. I was dangerous and full of intolerant self-importance.
I hope that “The Crash Room,” written
twenty years later, contains some of that terror, rushing—the stuttering
footsteps down a dim hall, the stuttering heartbeat. I left the lines
unstopped. Let there be the chopping rhythm of awful discovery. Let there be
the eerie smoothness that comes with the loss after the adrenalin lets go. The
momentary identification with the patient, as our chief resident taught us: at
a code, ‘the first pulse to check is your own.”
“The Crash Room” published in Poet Lore in 2002, became part of
my collection Toxic
Environment,
published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Oddly, that manuscript also includes a
later poem, “After performing CPR,” which appeared in Kalliope in 2003. It uses a
similar non-punctuated enjambed strategy but is intended to have a slower pace,
using the softer sounds of s’s and f’s, instead of the hard c’s and b’s of “The Crash Room.”
It tries to remember the body experience of CPR—the way the rhythm stays with
the body for days after the event, like dozing off after an evening of dancing
a dark, desperate dance.
AFTER
PERFORMING CPR
like
skiing the white hills of sleep
following
mountains all the bright chill
day
the rhythm of falling in time with
a
wind singing above the flight falling
yet
never touching ground sweet sore
muscle
learned and the child will breathe
will
open her eyes this time will breathe
Thirty
years later now, the experience stays with me. Though it’s no longer a frequent
requirement in my work, where the major emergencies are ‘social’ (child abuse,
foster care, substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, kids falling into
the criminal justice system), I still listen with a stethoscope and use an
otoscope and opthalmoscope for exams. But I try more and more to see and hear
with my eyes and ears and a thinking heart. I’ve come back to my little town in
New Hampshire and found it every bit as much suffering, and more, for children
in this pristine rural environment than in my ‘Toxic’ city. At the present, I
am not writing many poems. I thought I’d write about nature here in the pine
woods or spiritual life, gazing at white steeples. Perhaps, in another thirty
years, my words will be shaped by the urgent sufferings of these children. It
may be urgent that I write these stories before they are forgotten or I run out
of time.
After 30 years of
pediatric practice in inner-city Philadelphia, Kelley J. White now practices at a rural health center in her home
state, New Hampshrie. She received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
fellowship in poetry in 2008, which helped to support work on her most recent
collection, TWO BIRDS IN FLAME, poems related to the Shaker themes, and
published by Beech River Books.
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