Palo Alto neurologist Kendra Peterson's poem “Difficult Patient” (Fall 2017 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine), and the patient who inspired my “American Sonnet for an Addict” (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima) are prototypical victims of name-calling – a ubiquitous clinical behavior taught exclusively in the so-called hidden curriculum of medical education. These patients are our albatrosses, another name we ascribe, recalling the curse that befell the entire ship’s crew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous mariner following his killing of an albatross in the poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” They curse us. They burden and encumber us.
Read moreWhy are patients hesitant to tell the truth? A reflection on communication by public health scientist and activist Mariana Mcdonald
Communication. Open and forthright—what we want as patients and what providers require of us. But that can be difficult, as reflected in my short story “The Vent,” (Intima Fall 2025), where I explore a seriously injured man’s thoughts in the ICU. He complains: “Every time I went in to the clinic, they started asking the exercise question, no matter what I was there for. Got the flu, feverish and coughing, and there they are quizzing me about exercise.” His frustrations lead him to respond dishonestly to his providers’ questions: “It got so I would tell them what I thought they wanted to hear just to get them off my back. Said I took a walk every day, hardly ever drank... All lies, or fibs...”
Read moreWhere Fear About Living and Dying is Held: A reflection by UC San Diego internal medicine resident Tulsi Patel
When I read the Field Notes essay “Letter to My Oncologist” (Fall 2025 Intima), I was struck by how the writer, psychologist Julia Dobner-Pereira, watches her physician for the smallest fracture of a moment in composure—and how the physician watches her for the same. Their exchanges sit on a narrow ledge—two people trying to hold each other’s fear without admitting how much weight they’re carrying. I recognized that terrain immediately. As a clinician, I’ve felt patients monitor my breathing, my pauses, my half-smiles.
Read moreIn Story Lies the Cure by MD Ron Turker
“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 more