Stethoscope
===========

* Anne K Merritt

*   Creative writing
*   poetry
*   medical humanities
*   art and medicine
*   literature and medicine

> She has wandered with me
> 
> since my first days as a physician—
> 
> an unassuming extension of my ears,
> 
> gently slung about a tattered collar,
> 
> patiently transmitting rubs, rhonchi, rales,
> 
> as I struggled to decipher them.
> 
> She has sealed herself against unfamiliar skins—
> 
> wrinkled, jaundiced, tattooed, inflamed—
> 
> to magnify each breath sound and heartbeat
> 
> of my patients.
> 
> I have squeezed her to the point of suffocation
> 
> between my trembling hands.
> 
> I have let her venture into the territory of blood-stained garments
> 
> while I maintain a safe distance.
> 
> I have dropped her to the cold, hard tiles
> 
> in moments of crisis.
> 
> She has, with loving grace,
> 
> been present for diagnoses
> 
> that struck me to the bone:
> 
> tamponade,
> 
> heart attack,
> 
> pneumothorax.
> 
> Her bell was the first to transmit the vibrant thump
> 
> of a newborn's heartbeat,
> 
> and her diaphragm the last to touch the breast
> 
> of a dying mother.
> 
> She and I have united
> 
> to triumph over the x-ray machine,
> 
> to discover a heart murmur,
> 
> to distinguish pneumonia from pulmonary edema,
> 
> to comfort the distressed with a healing touch.
> 
> In the austere halls of this hospital,
> 
> she has listened to my own heart pound
> 
> over 100 million times,
> 
> brushing aside those skipped beats,
> 
> my moments of self-doubt.

## Footnotes

*   Competing interests None.

*   Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.