Doubt
Sally
I feel I cannot dance death’s dance.
My stethoscope hangs like a noose around my neck,
Everyday feels like a train wreck,
Has happened right around the corner.
Sometimes it feels like God is beating me down,
Beating me down, right into the ground.
I cannot save them all,
I cannot catch the ones that fall.
And like a metastasising cancer it’s slowly defeating me.
The difference between me & all the collars,
Is that it is not all about the dimes and the dollars.
It’s about helping those in most need,
So I will be there for them when they bleed.
This poem is about a young doctor struggling with the pressure from patients and colleagues. He is dealing with the fear of not knowing what to do. For years he has been protected and nurtured under a senior supervisor and now suddenly he has to make these life or death decisions all by himself; and he doesn’t trust himself. I think sometimes the worst kind of pressure is the pressure we put on ourselves.
I think that this poem is really reflective of how many young and newly qualified doctors will feel in their first jobs on the wards. It is interesting and compelling to read and understand the difficulty, desperation and exhaustion that a young doctor might experience.
I really like the verse about not being able to save everybody and fix every patient and I feel like this is something that would be especially difficult when you are first on wards as a junior doctor. It is easy to feel like you should have done more and should have been able to heal the patient when, in reality, there was nothing more that could have been done.
The phrase about helping those in need at the end is really poignant and a good way to end the poem because the majority of individuals who train to be doctors feel this way- if it was about the money, we could have chosen much easier jobs that pay much better. Instead we chose medicine because its nothing to do with money, it is about helping and supporting people who need it at that time.