Passions in Every Room.

Finding my way through a bramble of monitors tangled in the dense undergrowth of thorny data. Morning rounds are a forest thick with prickly questions. Perfect strangers become patients. Personalities baroque as the 50 year-old Hispanic man admitted yesterday with back pain. In prison for 19 years, (in America for 20) Arms, chest, and thick neck all Hieronymus Bosch and guitar-string calligraphy— one of his tears tattooed bruise-blue at the corner of his right eye. He doesn't speak a lick of English. Now his legs are dead and his bladder AWOL— the tumor declaring victory over his spinal cord. He hasn't wept in 20 years. Every room holds a gift reminding me that I'll never learn how much more there is to know. From the end of the hall a radio— Louis Armstrong sings What a Wonderful World. In the east wing, sunrise for patients who wake up. Some see hope, others a tease— Skies of blue, clouds of white. The prisoner's tears follow me all day after the dark sacred night. His Spanish was beautiful.