The Colors on Wards

Shaitalya Vellanki

White notes written by white coats who provide so called insight.

The days carry each other forward on the hospital wards.

No consults, no calls, no colleagues ignored.

It is expected that those white notes are right.

It is understood that those in white coats are erudite.

Yet one day a patient paints grey over the white.

A detail that was missed creates a devastating plight.

The patient now stands questioning the one in the white coat.

“What there something you missed, something you miswrote?”

The white is whisked away into a new palette of colors. 

The color of pain, the color of fear, the color of questioning all others.

The sincerest of apologies and the truest of truths is spoken.

Yet it seems the purest illusion of the white coat has broken.

But what the patient does next is simply thank the man in white.

“Your honor is preserved with me despite your lost fight.”

That coat remained white no matter how many paintings faded away. 

Because it was the tears drying colorless that had the most to say. 

Shaitalya Vellanki is a poet and second year internal medicine resident at George Washington Medical University.