Translating Chronic Pain: Moments and Fragments

'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!

Tag: medical (Page 4 of 4)

‘Focal Signal Intensity Enhancements’, by Maureen Miller

February 11, 2018 /

I’m poeming this poem 
from a forest-boreal 
transition zone 

anticipating intense 
public reaction 
to my poem

against the bony mets 
that XXXX up my posture
& infiltrate our nat’l backbone 

its prostate biopsy
analogy lost/inapparent
in the sagamore gloam

this spine unresponsive 
to the pre-patent analog 
that is my poem

 

  • by Maureen Miller
  • doctorwritermaureenmiller.tumblr.com

[This poem was inspired by an ad for a medical conference, “Summer Radiology Symposium at the Sagamore,” at an upstate New York retreat for Gilded Age millionaires. I found out about it while previewing prostate biopsies for a surgical pathology service. We don’t see the pain except in tissue core numbers. Who that’s most unfair to is the subject. Readers may decide.]

‘Food for Thought’, by Ryan Michael Dumas

February 8, 2018 /

Just got a letter from disability insurance: Denied. I’m not disabled enough to get anything. After months of trying to convince them.

How do you prove you can’t work?

I cannot sit up, stand, or walk hardly at all. There is no job I can do while laying down, without having to make phone calls.

Just laying here, my back aches. But it’s the most comfortable position I can find. (It hurts my hips but those aren’t important.)

If I dared to sit up, my lower and upper back would scream in agony. It would not end until I laid back down.

I couldn’t keep working; had to move back in with my toxic parents. I have no money, no freedom, and no chance. I have no future. And that terrifies me.

I’m a survivor. The world wants me dead. It’s only a matter of time.

 

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