Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse

By Joseph Gascho

How does a young boy, growing up in rural Nebraska, decide to become a cardiologist? What drew him and kept him on his journey to practice medicine at a young age, encounter death, and deal with professors--and later patients--who are, each of them, characters, whether challenging or easy to enjoy? How does the sensitive boy react as a physician when things go wrong or family and work lives seem to be in conflict? Too, this doctor is a man of faith; both the scientifically and the spiritually committed will wonder how he squares these worlds. How does it feel to give bad news--sometimes to a patient you have cared for over decades, when "caring" is no euphemism? This physician-author shares his deepest responses to his complex life, whose high stakes each of us shares, as he looks back at his life in this second collection of narrative poems that resonate with health care workers and lay persons alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666793239

Joseph Gascho

Joseph Gascho is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of humanities and medicine at Penn State University College of Medicine. He is the author of a book of poetry, Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls and Sermons: Growing Up in Nebraska. He was recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine best poem of the year in 2014 and has had numerous commended poems in the international Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine annual poetry competitions.

Book preview

To My Patients

You gaze upon the image on the monitor

made up of bits of sound that bounce from probe

through skin to heart then back again

and think it shows what broke your heart.

But hearts are fickle things,

have reasons of their own

that you and I will never know.

To Barb

That first year she works the 3–11,

fends off the doc who snuggles up

Your hair is beautiful.

Head nurse in recovery room

until the day their child is born

and then she stays at home

caring for the baby boy who hates to sleep

and her man exhausted from his nights on call.

She feeds him, beds him, pays the bills,

unclogs the drains and takes the car to Jiffy Lube.

In ten more years, she packs his bags

when he jets off to meetings

where he pontificates

about infarctions of the heart.

Her father introduces her as the doctor’s wife.

But when the kids grow up, she’s the one

they go to when their friends won’t call,

they miss the cut to make the team,

their bellies ache.

And when he wakes her up one night

I think I overate, it must be gas

she’s the one who says I’m calling 911.

And she is right, as she is always right.

Hearing the Call