Shakespearean Scintigraphic Verse: SPECTiloquy

REVIEW of POETIC PARODY 

ORIGINAL POEM:   Monologue, Act iii, Shakepeare's "Hamlet".

PUBLISHED POETRY: J Nucl Cardiol 2001; reprinted with modification, with permission of the author.

Keywords: medical, poem

SPECTiloquy

MIBI or not MIBI – that is confusion.

Whether ’tis sooner in the morn to schedule

The slice and planars of four-valenced Fosmin

Or to tape arms; or switch to sonic bubbles,

And harmonising, spin them. To back-project

No more – yet by a scan know hard events,

The infarcts and the cardiogenic shock

That FLASH may err to; ’tis prognostication

Most worthy to be JACCed. Supine? No creep?

To buy – perchance to lease. Aye, there’s the rub;

For from that Fund of Dreams, what grants may come

When we have fended off the MR coil

Might give us PET! There’s FDG

That checks viability of so long life.

For who would bear the weak and scattered rays,

The Plot-Polar’s wrong, non-prone man’s false-positive,

The shade of displaced breast, 4-hour delay,

The overcrowded office and the jerks

That patients jitt’ry neath the camera make,

When he himself might his retirement take

With a part pension? Who would BATOs flare,

To rush and sweat such a short bio-life?

But that for stress perfusion after SPECT,

The cyclotronic cash-sink from whose beam

No billables return triples the cost,

And makes us rather milk the Tech [Tc99m] we have

Than Five-Elevens that we slow nought of.