Amy Haddad is a poet, nurse, and educator who taught in the health sciences at Creighton University, where she is now a Professor Emerita.
Dorothy Woodman’s poem “The Waiting” (Intima, Spring 2013) and my poem “Running the Scans Gauntlet” (Intima, Spring 2022) share similar underlying images and themes yet differ in form and length to convey the experiences of patients undergoing diagnostic tests for staging cancer. The repetition of “waiting” appears in both poems for that is what patients do—in machines, in halls, lined up against walls. Waiting in some form extends over hours, days, or even weeks.
Health professionals wait, too, but more often in line for a bracing jolt of caffeine or a quick meal. These poems describe the clothes patients wear, “hospital garb” and “scrubs,” to differentiate them from normal folks who are “clothed in the outside world.” Technicians call patients by name or number. There is little to distract those who wait, only old magazines or silent televisions. Diagnostic procedures are routine for health professionals but not for patients who often find a hospital or clinic a strange and unsettling place.
The stanza breaks in “The Waiting” give the reader room to breathe, to take a break between the next tests. The form slows the process which mirrors a world where “clocks break down and weep”—my favorite line in Woodman’s poem. There are no breaks in “Running the Scans Gauntlet” just as there were no breaks for the unlucky victims of this centuries-old form of military punishment inflicted on the guilty or innocent. The accused ran, as fast and far as possible, through two lanes of fellow soldiers who repeatedly struck him with sticks, knotted ropes, or spears. I wanted to capture the exhaustion of “running” from floor to floor and building to building in an academic medical center as well as something approaching the pride one feels reaching the end. Both poems close on an unknown future “captured by each dividing cell” as Woodman suggests. Patients leave the confines of the hospital and wait, yet again, for the results of the tests and what will follow.
Amy Haddad is a poet, nurse, and educator who taught in the health sciences at Creighton University, where she is now a Professor Emerita. She is the 2019 recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine poetry prize for “Families Like This” for the best poem published in the journal. She won 3rd place for the 2019 Kalanithi Writing Awards from Stanford University for her poem “Dark Rides.” Her first chapbook The Geography of Kitchens was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2021. Her first poetry collection, An Otherwise Healthy Woman, was published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, in March 2022.