Diagrams of children born with heart defects are common in medical education. Carle Illinois College of Medicine Joshua Chen’s poem is the imagined life of one of those children.
Tetralogy of Fallot
forty weeks from now his mother will give birth to
sapphire as rich as the earth he squats over. The other
boys will laugh at him until they turn as blue as his
mother’s gemstone: nature trimmed him with lead and
formed his flesh with coincidence and condolences. He is thankful for
strong knees he holds to his chest as tightly as his mother’s
arms wrapped around him that day the surgeon asked
for her child and restitched its insides. But why should she be sad?
Icarus, too, was wrapped in prostaglandin when he flew
for cyan skies
Joshua Chen's poem, Tetralogy of Fallot, imagining the life of a child born with a heart defect commonly known as blue baby syndrome, was one of seven works to earn honorable mention in NEOMED's 42nd Annual Williams Carlos Williams Poetry Competition from their Department of Family and Community Medicine. More information is available here.
As an undergraduate, Joshua Chen studied physics and English at Emory University while testing and counseling patients at an HIV/AIDS clinic. Those patients’ narratives influenced him to write about how contagion becomes metaphor. He plans to pursue psychiatry with an interest in the ways that socialization and language shape medical diagnoses. Outside of medicine and poetry, he enjoys painting, watching horror movies, and running through cornfields.
"When you study medicine and disease, different conditions can have descriptions that are so overly objective that it reads like an abstraction from what actually goes on in a patient’s life. I find it helpful to remind myself that illness is experiential because that subjectivity is a key feature of medicine. I’ve always liked poetry because the way it expresses its subjects doesn’t always follow the “rules” that most writing forms do, just as how an experienced illness doesn’t always follow a checklist of signs and symptoms." -- Joshua Chen