As A Doctor, I Am Looking to Make Common Cause

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September 25, 2018

a project of ServiceSpace

tell them
i stood
side by side
the doctors and the dreamers
a poem in my left hand
a scalpel in the right
tried and tried to funnel
lilies and light
from poems
into the tip of my scalpel
cut a slice of bread
for the hungry.

- Sriram Shamasunder -

As A Doctor, I Am Looking to Make Common Cause

"As residents, we worked and lived in the hospital so many nights. It felt like home. On one of my days off, in street clothes, jeans and a t shirt, I went into the hospital to finish dictating some patient notes. It was morning. There was a metal detector coming into the hospital. I collected my stale coffee from the cafeteria. Later that morning, I got stopped by a police guard coming out of the bathroom, suspicious I might have been shooting up in one of the bathroom stalls. I presented my doctors ID out of my jeans pocket and immediately apologies flowed like water from an open faucet from the mouth of the police guard. My dark skin is so much like my patients. I learned never to walk the hospital without an ID. Until then, the hospital had felt like home. It was not a home where I could move freely without question. It was not my home. " Poet-doctor Sriram Shamasunder shares more in this stirring, spoken word narrative of what it means to be a brown-skinned doctor in America, and what it takes to go beyond our differences to make common cause with one another as members of the human family. { read more }

Be The Change

What steps can you take this week to make common cause with another? The Heal Initiative, co-founded by Sri at UCSF has a mission to achieve health care equity for vulnerable populations. For more inspiration, explore their work here. { more }

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