Abby Caplin

ABOUT ABBY CAPLIN

Abby Caplin grew up in Los Angeles, California during the 1960s. This time of burgeoning social change movements helped shape her consciousness and passion for peace and justice. Following her medical training in Texas, Abby moved to San Francisco, where she completed a fellowship and practiced allergy medicine. At the age of thirty-one, she developed an autoimmune illness and began to explore writing as a therapeutic modality.

Abby earned a master’s degree in integral counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2002, an East-West graduate psychology program, and currently practices mind-body medicine and counseling in San Francisco. She led “Mind-Body Health Writing” workshops for many years for people living with illness, and continues to use journaling and poetry in her daily work with clients. Her poetry collection A Doctor Only Pretends was published in May 2022.

Read Matthew Lippman’s Review of “A Doctor Only Pretends: Poems about illness, death, and in-between” on Tikkun Magazine!

“A Doctor Only Pretends is grounded in a voice that sings.

It’s lyrical in its sonic quality and it bellows the backbeat of the heart.

We want to live when we read and hear these poems…”

—Matthew Lippman

COUNTY HOSPITAL RESIDENTS

Immigrant doctors,
training again in a residency program
far from home,
tripping over English on
morning rounds.

Tell me how you became a doctor.

I grew up in Egypt, Vietnam, India,
Japan, Mexico, Argentina,
China, Peru, Indonesia, Kenya.

My father died.
My sister died.
My mother died.
My brother died.

I couldn’t help.

Tell me how you became.

I was ten when I got
my first pair of shoes.

We washed our clothes in the river.

I left my mother’s village
deep in the mountains.

Tell me how.

I was a medical student,
stationed in the jungle, when
a mother banged on my door
with her seizing baby.
We drove four hours,
but he died thirty minutes
before we got to the hospital.

Tell me.

I was a cardiologist,
but my husband hit me.
I got away.

And now she bends over her patient,
looks for bruises. Now he
writes orders in the chart, prays
they’ll be carried out.
Now she touches, gently,
Mr. Taylor’s cold hand,
who lived alone upstairs,
in his wheelchair,
in the scariest part of town.