Returning from vacation as a primary care physician, as any physician, can be a daunting task. I wrote a flash essay for Pulse about the intense timeline of a typical family physician’s workday. You can imagine after being gone for a week the mountain of forms, test results, and emails that accumulate. Even when you have, as I do (many don’t), supportive partners who do their best to clean out as much of the inbox as possible, there’s a particular dread and pressure that occurs for the primary care physician returning to work. In medicine, everything is connected to a patient. A response delayed, an aberrancy missed, means damage—emotional or physical—to a very real person.

It was on such a day, back to work after a week of camping and s’mores and searching for sand dollars on a Washington coast beach with my family, that I stumbled upon a poem. Our clinic is set up with exam rooms jutting in from corridors that originate like tributaries from the hallways that line the perimeter of the building. Our offices dot the exterior hallway, windows overlooking the parking lot or other buildings in the business complex.

I was walking along this exterior hallway, brisk step between patients, stuffing my stethoscope back into my stiff white coat pocket, when I was struck by a nondescript sheet of paper tacked to the bulletin board just outside our nurses’ office. “Good Bones” caught my eye, made me pause mid-stride. There were patients to examine, lab results to respond to, phone calls to make, radiographs to interpret, but I stopped and turned and read the familiar lines.

I’ve followed poet Maggie Smith’s work for some time. I find poetry alluring and intimidating. I took Michelle Penaloza’s excellent poetry class at Hugo House last fall to overcome my perplexion, but found it would take much more investment to grasp all I wanted about the craft of poetry. Smith’s work is relatable; my contemporary, a mother, an artist, her words resonate and I instantly became a fan.

But to see her here, amidst my other vocation, my medical science workday of Pap smears and skin biopsies and asthma exacerbations, was foreign, a collision of worlds. Though I’ve written about and taught narrative medicine for several years now, though I’m aware of the benefits, to both the physician and patient, of integrating the humanities into the science of medicine, I’ve still found it challenging to be present with such art during the compressive restrictions of my primary care workday. So, Smith’s poem, tacked inconspicuously along a back hallway bulletin board, among graphs of clinic access and Medicare Five Star goals and HEDIS measures and Press Ganey patient satisfaction scores, was a welcome interruption, a surprising reminder, an appropriate intermission interjected into a hectic workday.

I asked around for several days after, attempting to determine who had posted the poem of maintaining hope amidst a broken world. Though I was told it had been up for weeks, maybe months, I never did find the culprit. That same week Glennon Doyle highlighted this very poem on her social media. For me a collision of two women I admire, I’ve never met, whose good works are far from medicine, far from my little corner of primary care amidst the jutting mountains, the emerald waters of the Pacific Northwest. But the lessons, the convictions, the challenge of poetry is relevant, maybe the most relevant to my interactions with patients, my titration of insulin regimens, my diagnoses of cancer, my prescribing of antidepressants, my listening to histories to evaluate an unintentional weight loss or a shortness of breath or an abdominal distention leaving a patient in excruciating pain.

Maybe an antidote to our broken healthcare system, the crux of narrative medicine, a balm for medical professionals suffering from compassion fatigue and secondary trauma and a system that increasingly squeezes the humanity out of of its providers, rests in the complex workings, the simple act of reading poetry. There’s instruction in the words, in the art of the line break, illumination of humanity in the universal themes presented. A reminder that at the heart of medicine we serve people, we are people, we are all in this together. Poetry infuses humanity back into this most human, most intimate of professions. Medicine is a science but it is also an art. For all of our sakes, maybe it’s time to embrace that pairing in an inspired, more hopeful way.

Writing Prompt: How do you talk with children about the difficult aspects of this world? Despite the brokenness observed and felt, do you try to sell your children on the world in the hopes that they would attempt to make it beautiful? Do you see poetry in medicine? Why or why not? Write for 10 minutes.