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A Doctor Who Treats Himself Has a Fool for a Patient
—Sir William Osler, 1849-1919
Michael Salcman

The first night alone, I re-warmed my wife’s meatloaf and made rice
with cinnamon on top; the next dinner a roast beef sandwich with chips.
All week I ate out with friends: fried chicken, spare ribs, duck confit—
not a single meal with anything from the ocean except for oysters.
Neighbors who knew better fed me cube steak and home-fried potatoes.

I’d spent the month before leaking from my rectum and worrying over
a villous adenoma of the bowel or paralysis of my anal sphincter.
A day after my wife and daughter left, I didn’t even fart as much as the cat!
I thought it must be my nightly martini or pizza, or probably stress,
too much tuna or purified water. As a test I stopped doing anything healthy

or politically correct. When the hips started hurting and my left leg went numb
down to the toes, I was certain my spine had narrowed at sixty or else
I had pissed a disc into my tail bone. Four days later all symptoms had gone
when I heard my wife at the door shouting “Honey, we’re home.”

—
Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Cafe Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good Is Better, Poetry in Medicine (his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness, and healing), A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces (the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, also from Spuyten Duyvil, appeared in early 2022.

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