More Than a Body
In the first months of training,
we learn to split the world open.
Bone becomes hinge,
muscle becomes curtain,
we peek at what lies beneath.
I tell myself this is learning,
but some days it feels like excavation
as if every body is a buried cathedral
and we kneel at the altar
with scalpels instead of prayers.
The textbook says origin, insertion,
but no one warns you how the tendons
resemble threads from an old sweater,
how easily one tug
might unravel you too.
During rounds, my preceptor says
listen for the heart’s murmurs,
and suddenly the body becomes a flock
of restless birds.
Systole beats its wings against the ribs,
diastole softly settles in its nest.
I lean in, trying to decipher
which bird is singing wrong.
Some nights I dream the wards
are a vast, half-lit forest.
Patients bloom and wither in beds
like wildflowers we weren’t taught to name.
I wander, my pockets full,
with segments of a map
hoping one might become a guide
to lead me when the path fades.
Once, holding a patient’s hand,
I felt the tremor of something unteachable ,
a current running back through every lecture,
every page, every diagram that pretended
to know the human soul.
For a moment, I thought
So this is it.
The thing we pretend is science
is really someone’s final slumber
as the world awakens again and again.
And still, we practice
suturing the quiet edges of our fear,
palpating the tender places
where doubt calcifies.
We memorize, rehearse, repeat,
until our bodies are their own mnemonics.
No one tells you that becoming a clinician
means offering yourself up
letting the world carve lessons into you
the way water carves a canyon,
the way time rounds a stone.
But some days, under the fluorescents,
I feel the shape of who I’m becoming
a vessel widening,
a blade honing,
a creature learning to hold
the weight of another’s breaking
without shattering in return.
And I think
maybe this is it
to stand in the bright, blunt truth of a life,
to say I am here, tell me more
and to realize that here
is not the room but the moment,
made again every time
another voice
reminds you of your calling.
Jacquelyn Elise Fitzgerald is a medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, involved in clinical and surgical outcomes research and community-based patient care, with interests in medical humanities and reflective writing.