deconstructing the nurse

They took an equation from hydrodynamics

and tweaked it to represent bloodflow through hearts.

If I do it myself – work the math out – then maybe 

the textbook won't feel like an alien language and 

maybe these letters and words will combine into 

some kind of meaning. It's med school – somehow

and someday all these wild constellations of facts

will combine into sense – so my heroes all say.
I'll take what I already know and then make
all the new parts fit in. Should be simple, why not? 

Just substitute numbers for letters and you can

derive heart rate, stroke volume, viscosity;

take the things that you know and the things the profs tell you

and put them together and figure it out,

step by step, piece by piece, part on part to a whole. 

Whole. I had a whole once. Prized amalgam of parts, 

practical and cohesive, but just not enough for 

my wondering mind: sometimes mud-bogged-wheel slow, 

sometimes faster than thought, limbic lightning – I loved 

that part, loved walking into a room and just 

knowing what’s up – putting clues all together – click 

satisfaction of frontal lobe certainty, decoded 

beats of a cardiac Morse code or hepatic ciphers 

or nephritic runes all aligned in the filters of what

nursing teaches and familiar rules that experience lays down.

But inside me the hunger was restless – to widen 

the borders called known and to call my discoveries 

by name and to lay hands on problems myself – 

not to set up and clean up for doctors, or call them

for explanations, orders, diagnoses, 

or argue my case well enough that a doctor

would check for herself that my findings were real –

to explain not just cliff notes of stories, but tell why the road

leads this way, why the treatment could work, why this enzyme

or that is a wild card. I wanted so desperately to know why

and do what and show how that I gambled the whole that I had.

I’m not sorry, except for brief moments like this – 

I’d have answers by now in my old world; I look

past the textbook and into my cerebral skies, where 

faint stars of new knowledge are kindling, soft, slow, 

where the lightning once played like a rampaging kitten.
I had my equations and knowledge and facts
I had proved over time, the grooves of their well-worn
connections; I thought I'd just add to or tweak them,
like textbook and teacher have done now with physics;
I thought I'd add rooms to the mansion of nursing
and new halls, to turn it to medicine's house. 

I thought I’d just lengthen my roads of discovery

but the new world takes bridges, ships, planes; the new world

doesn't fit in my other roads, rules, codes, and filters. 

So now I am tearing my old whole apart.