When Medicine Seems Thankless: Poetry and Gratitude

Long hours, increasing patient complexity, eroded autonomy, and more: the grind of clinical care can seem thankless, especially to medical trainees. All these frustrations find blunt expression in “I cut off his leg,” the poem’s title itself benumbed, a last-resort procedure reduced to rote violence. The speaker’s cynicism-cum-demoralization is further apparent in the opening lines’ brutal self-assessment: “I’m basically a monkey/some-guy/a 7th grader with a ‘passion for helping people.’” The ironies only deepen as the workday’s miseries progress, from “I roll in with the darkness,” with its implication that providing care brings gloom, to the inappropriate remedy of “my boss plays Hawaiian music as he dissects a live leg.” The seething desperation culminates with “I cut off his leg/throw it in a bag/and send it to hell,” with its gratuitous repetition of the heartless title. Yet as we descend from this nadir into the final stanza, we are surprised to be uplifted by the poem’s greatest irony of all. The patient “wakes up/and with promise in his eyes/now more alive than when he was whole/thanks me.” If poetry is anything, it is a giving of thanks for what is human in us, a voice that makes us whole even amidst brokenness. The paradox of the last line, “Thanks me for cutting off his leg,” by reclaiming that dreadful act and humanizing it through gratitude, heals not only the patient, but the doctor too.