Poetry therapy.

Many years ago I received an urgent Friday afternoon consult from the surgery service. ‘‘Incipient DTs,’’ the resident told me. ‘‘We’ve got this guy, status-post pancreatitis, post-op cholecystectomy, he’s going down the tube.’’ It turned out that the patient was an irascible middle-aged man named Chuck Benderton who a day or so after surgery had gotten agitated and started to swear at his doctors. So they concluded that he was slipping into an alcohol withdrawal syndrome and snowed him with Serax and thiamine. Well, things went from bad to worse. In his lucid periods, Mr. Benderton insisted that he wasn’t an alcoholic, he didn’t drink, and hewas in severe pain and goddamn scared, and hewanted to know what the hell was going on. He threw his box of tissues across the room. Amedical student toldme that his resident had indicated on rounds that Mr. Benderton presented a typical picture of alcohol withdrawal, ‘‘Notice especially the way he denies drinking.’’ I sat down beside the patient, who was restrained in his chair. Mr. Benderton had long, greasy hair, a big red nose, tattoos on both arms, and a foul mouth you could light a fire with. At first he appeared delirious and paranoid, pretty much as advertised. But then a surprising thing happened. When I brought him a carton of apple juice, he brightened up and started to talk sense. Eventually I ascertained that he was suffering from a postoperative drug reaction, rather than alcohol withdrawal. We straightened things out, and the patient recovered without further incident. Subsequently, I became Chuck Benderton’s internist and learned a lot more about him. He was a 56-year-old heavy smoker from Braddock, a mill town on the Monongahela River. When Chuck was a kid, he had survived a bout of poliomyelitis, spending several months in an iron lung at the old Communicable Disease Hospital near the football stadium, and since then he had spent his life in a wheelchair. He lived in a row house with his mother until