Ports & Poems: Poetry and the Experience of Medical Intervention

Medicine is often organized around intervention: insert the IV, place the tube, administer the medication, complete the treatment. We tend to evaluate these interventions by what they accomplish. Did the treatment work? Did the numbers improve? Did the disease respond?

The body often experiences intervention differently. It experiences the needle, the tape, the pressure, the restricted movement, the irritation, and the repeated exposure to medical spaces. A life-preserving intervention can also become something the body has to endure.

Two poems, Dennis Freire’s “You’re Here Again” (2026) and Alice Wong’s “Hooked Up Online” (1995), offer different accounts of this experience. Freire writes about the repetitive demands of cancer treatment, returning again and again for the procedures and testing required by a clinical trial. Wong, writing after an ICU experience in the context of her life with muscular dystrophy, describes a body permeated by medical technology: tubes for breathing, feeding, and elimination, along with the sweat, itching, dirt, tape, and irritated skin that accompany them.

Their circumstances are different, and the meanings they make from those circumstances are not interchangeable. But the poems do share a phenomenological experience: the experience of a body being worn down by the very interventions that sustain it.

Freire’s poem captures the cumulative quality of repeated medical care. The hospital is no longer an extraordinary destination. It becomes part of the landscape of illness, the doors, the chair, the needle, and even the parking lot. His veins become “worn” and “reluctant,” suggesting that the body itself registers the accumulation of treatment. Yet Freire also describes this continued return as a kind of bodily loyalty. Showing up becomes its own form of courage.

There is something important here for clinicians. We often think of courage as something required during a dramatic medical event: a diagnosis, a surgery, a frightening procedure. But chronic illness can demand a quieter form of courage, the courage of repetition. The patient returns because treatment matters, even when returning has become physically and psychologically exhausting.

Wong's poem brings this exhaustion even closer to the body's surface. “I have a tube that pees me. / I have a tube that feeds me. / I have a tube that breathes me.” The technology that sustains her life has become part of the infrastructure of her body. 

And yet the body does not become indifferent to that infrastructure. Wong describes itching, sweat, dirt, stained bandages, gauze, and tape. Her striking image of “tube upon tube” as “the interstate of my body” captures both the complexity and the intimacy of technological dependence. Medical equipment can become so familiar that it is woven into ordinary bodily experience, while remaining capable of producing discomfort, irritation, vulnerability, and intrusion. 

This is one way to understand medical trauma's domain of bodily threat. Not every IV, tube, procedure, or device is traumatic. But medical equipment can become an extension of an already threatened body. The body may remain under threat even while it is being protected from threat. The intervention that prevents harm can simultaneously introduce new sensations, constraints, vulnerabilities, and reminders of bodily fragility.

The wearing down described in these poems is therefore both physical and psychological. Pain, irritation, fatigue, restricted movement, and altered bodily sensation can produce vigilance, dread, frustration, or helplessness. But the relationship also moves in another direction. Psychological exhaustion can heighten awareness of bodily sensations and make the next needle, tube, or appointment feel heavier. Over time, what was once an extraordinary medical event can become an enduring bodily condition.

The phenomenological experience of medical intervention is not defined solely by what an intervention is intended to accomplish or how effectively it accomplishes it. A procedure can be life-preserving and distressing. A device can restore function and alter a person's relationship with their body. Treatment can be wanted, necessary, and exhausting.

Both poems describe a body worn down by medical intervention, but through different lenses shaped by illness characteristics, history, and time. Freire writes about his induction into the persistence of illness; Wong writes from a perspective in which medical intervention has already become a deeply and permanently intertwined part of her existence. 

The shared phenomenology of being medically worn does not produce a shared meaning. For Freire, repetition becomes a form of persistence: the body keeps showing up because there is somewhere it hopes to go. For Wong, medical intervention is less a temporary detour and more a part of the infrastructure of living in her body. Across people, the same tubes, needles, and interventions can therefore signify something profoundly different depending on one's relationship to illness, time, and the possibility of a body without them.