“Young doctors are young for a blink, and they age with their patients. My advice to my young colleagues: knock first and then, most importantly, listen for the response. Listen for their story. In story lies the cure.”
Read moreReaching Across Death: A letter to my grandmother by Stanford medical student Madison Palmer
“In this reflection, I explore the barriers between understanding grief and communicating with ancestors beyond life…. I particularly focus on what it means to ‘reach’ out for an ancestor across the barrier of their death.”
Read moreThe Narrative Medicine Promise: Why It Pays to Listen. A reflection by McGill University researcher Homa Fathi
“I believe educators should remain steadfast in integrating the humanities into health professions education. There are many—particularly systemic—barriers to such efforts, but the outcomes can be deeply rewarding.”
Read moreOn Inter-Pathology Envy: A reflection by writer and neurologist Ann Bebensee
“I have found that [breast and colorectal cancer patients] share the same labyrinth and my new, uncertain life is not quite as frightening. The blue of a colon cancer ribbon is lovely. So is pink.”
Read more"Who knew that time was the biggest factor in compassion?" A reflection about effective clinical care by writer Lisa Simone Kingstone
“The center was my rest stop in my trek through cancer. It shimmers through my own understanding of how to care for people…But over a decade later, what I remember most is a feeling of restoration. … Being a patient makes you feel like a baby in a basket floating down a river with rapids.”
Read moreListening to Ordinary Things Can Get You Through the Day by cancer advocate and writer Robert McEachern
“Godfrey’s piece … reminds me how stories get told and re-told in many ways, in many layers. Like medicine in a glass bottle, sometimes our stories stay inside us, waiting to be opened, waiting for the words.”
Read moreThe Scars of Our Silence: Medicine’s Discomfort with Dying by palliative care physician Lindsey Ulin
“Years later, I still wonder what story the family of my patient carries of that death. The one thing they most needed to hear—that their loved one was dying—remained unsaid.”
Read moreRemembering in the Rain: A reflection on anxiety and OCD by Cynthia Miller, MD, MPH
“Psychologist and writer Faith Galliano Desai provides a solution, but it isn’t an easy one. She instructs us to remember that anxiety is energy that must move. If we let it pass through us, it will lose its power.”
Read moreThe Language of Endurance by educator and patient advocate Mark E. Paull
“For fifty-eight years, I've lived with Type 1 Diabetes. My body speaks in tremors, in metallic tastes, in sudden collapses that look like laziness to people who don't know better…I've spent decades translating myself for others—apologizing for leaving early, for needing to sit, for being tired when I looked fine.”
Read moreOn the Emotional Geography of Care by artist Annunziata Tricarico
“When facing illness or pain in any form, we often find ourselves alone. Not because the world is insensitive, but because even those who love us sometimes do not know how to help, how to interact, or cannot find the right words.”
Read moreWhat is Grief-Sight? Writer and researcher Valk Fisher reflects on what prompts it.
I began to see grief everywhere.
A diagnosis started it, though I didn’t know, exactly, what I was seeing. I had no words for the gnawing inside my gut, the tightness beneath my sternum, the exhales that were just that much heavier. Grief was everywhere, but nameless. It became larger and louder until I could sense it, name it, be with it, speak about it. Only then did I begin to smile – really smile – again.
Grief will require it be Seen.
Read moreOn Letting Go: A reflection about a writer dealing with the experience of living with sarcoidosis by Michigan doctor Janet Greenhut
In her essay, “Giving Up the Fight” (Nonfiction, Intima, Spring 2023), Rebecca Stanfel tells the story of her experience living with sarcoidosis. She was the mother of a young child when the disease arose and was frequently incapacitated by pain, vertigo, and fatigue, as well as by lengthy hospitalizations. One doctor told her she might “drop dead at any moment.”
Read moreHow Big Moments Hide in the Mundane Ones: A reflection by Intima editor Priya Amin
“Leaving my homeland means carrying these uncertainties with the knowledge that a phone call, an email, a single test result can change the shape of a life we thought we knew. But like sea glass, we are shaped by what we endure, softened by time, and held together by the stories we share across miles and years.”
Read moreThe Discordant Note of the Estranged Daughter from California. A reflection about medically-assisted death by Amanda Le Rougetel
The “estranged daughter from California” is an expression used by MAiD practitioners to describe that relative who shows up to rail against the dying person’s wishes to end their life.
Read moreThe Power of Stories to Change Attitudes: A reflection by fiction editor Daly Walker
“How can people in our country be convinced it is right to share our bounty with the world’s less fortunate?”
Read moreDesperate to be Well: A reflection about the level of comfort (or discomfort) about what we wear when we're ill by Liddy Grantland
“We don't control what happens to our bodies, but we do control how we respond. How we adorn. And how we move through the world.”
Read moreGetting to Say Goodbye: A reflection by patient advocate Holly Cantley
“There is bravery in enduring. There is bravery in leaving.”
Read moreThe Practice of Uncertainty: Understanding the suffering and mercies witnessed in our everyday work by nurse practitioner Meg Sniderman
“As I move through my clinic days now, the challenge is not so much in knowing what to do; it is in managing the moments of not knowing.”
Read moreThe Search for Omens Amid Infertility. A Reflection by Melissa Cummins
“In all instances, there are two words that encapsulate what good and bad omens share: Why not? Why not be cautious when my gut makes my hair stand at attention, and why not hope when there is nothing but hoping to do?”
Read moreReasons for Running Late: A reflection and response about documentation and no-time to dally days by pediatric OT Fiona Dunbar
“I am well practiced at stuffing feelings aside until later—or until never—in favor of being less late for the next child and family.”
Read more