If the objective is to minimize suffering, yours and mine, as patient and healthcare professional, how do we gesture to each other around the barriers of an imperfect system? Is there any gesture of care too small?
Read moreInitiating a Dialogue with Patients: The Power of Asking, Not Telling by Victoria Yuan
© Chronos Mind Heart. Mariana Ndrio. Fall 2025 Intima
In Mariana Ndrio’s “Chronos: Mind and Heart” (Spring 2025 Intima), crimson and white wires coil together, capturing the intricate relationship between thought and feeling. This symbiosis reminds me of some of the patients who informed my artwork titled “Pericardial Mnemosyne” (Fall 2024 Intima). Patients sometime delay treatment for their metastatic breast cancer because the diagnosis exhumes memories of family or friends who had complex experiences with breast cancer treatment and those who hadn’t survived. Without treatment, however, cancer cells can secret fluid into the sac around the heart – an effusion that swells and stifles the heart from pumping. During hospital stays, the treatment team not only drains the effusion but also opens up the conversation about treating cancer.
Read moreA Reflection on Fathers and Daughters by Dixie L. King
In the essay “My Father’s Doctor” (Spring 2016 Intima), Pennsylvania pediatrician Jennifer Chianese purports to write about her father’s relationship with his female doctor and the ways in which that relationship is both rooted in and transcends the traditional roles for women that is his cultural heritage. Her father sees future opportunity for his own daughters in this doctor who would later make headlines by killing her elderly parents. But the secondary story is that of Chianese’s relationship with her father, who became terminally ill when she was just 10 years old, and how she processed through his impending loss. The doctor tells her, “This is a difficult time for your parents. You need to be on your best behavior.”
Read moreLearning How to Live While Knowing the Ending by Katerina Obscura
© What Remains. Alexandra Miner. Spring 2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
When I first encountered Alexandra Miner’s “What Remains” (Spring 2021 Intima) in the early days of my own glioma diagnosis, I finally exhaled a breath that I’d held deep down. My physicians did care! Despite losing so much function, and my grief over the life I’d built, the questions I spiraled on were valid! There is a priceless comfort in feeling seen in the uncertainty and cruelty of receiving a life-limiting diagnosis as a young(er) adult (YA).
Read moreVoices That Remain: A dialogue about mentors, memory and what matters
Some voices outlast the people who spoke them. In his Crossroads blog, “The Voice that Lingers,” (June 19, 2026 Intima) Kenneth Iserson, a professor emeritus of emergency medicine, tells it as a physician: the dead mentor keeps speaking in a student's stethoscope, in a resident's patience at two in the morning, even in the margin of a machine's report that has learned to wait before it concludes. The voice refuses to be deleted — not because anyone saved it, but because it had gone in too deep, beneath the skin, beneath the name, where not even death goes looking.
Read moreA Bunny, Beauty and Remembering to Live: A reflection by narrative medicine practitioner Alexis Rehrmann
© Memento Mori Danica Snyder Spring 2025 Intima
The bunny drew me in first. She is a well-loved stuffie, fur lightly matted even sketched in pencil, form slightly squashed from years of use.
Danica Snyder’s “Memento Mori, Memento Vivere” (Spring 2025 Intima) is in vibrant conversation with my essay “Maybe It’s Beautiful,” which I am pleased to have published here a year later in Spring-Summer 2026. What I love about Snyder’s work is her riotous use of color and pattern and the unresolved ambiguities that lie underneath.
The Body Holds It All: Love, Labor, and the Weight of Care by Mildred Galvez
With the same hands that now hold and annotate my textbooks, I once read and reread my mother’s biopsy results. With those same hands, I helped her rise from her chair when the chemotherapy was too strong, and with those same hands, I now care for my patients.
Read moreWhen the Script Is Not Enough: A reflection about clinical interviews by medical student Macie Garner
In physician Chloe Nazra Lee’s essay “’I Love You’ in Cantonese,” a psychiatry trainee worries she has failed at interviewing. Instead of correcting her technique, her attending offers unexpected advice: Stop worrying about the checklist and just talk to the patient. Clinical interviews, he suggests, are not only about completion but about making room for connection. In that space, conversation itself can become therapeutic, not only for the patient but also for the clinician.
Read moreLiving Alongside Loss: A reflection on grief, rituals, and gratitude by Diego R. Hijano
© Womb by Johanna Glaser. Acrylic paints, linocut prints, tissue paper and pens.
“I made this collage as a gift for a pregnant friend using a mixture of acrylic paints, linocut prints, tissue paper and pens. It is inspired by and directly draws upon elements from a portrait of a young dead woman by Egon Schiele. At the time, I was in the middle of a palliative care fellowship and personally recovering from a severe IBD flare. It is a meditation on birth, illness, joy, pain and death; an expression of awe as to how humans can simultaneously be wounded, age, heal, celebrate and create throughout the seasons of our lives.”
Johanna Glaser’s collage “Womb” (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima) challenges the idea that life unfolds in emotional stages. Instead, it holds simultaneity:
Birth beside illness.
Joy beside grief.
Healing beside wounding.
Presence beside absence.
That duality emerges in writer and educator Valk Fisher’s Field Notes essay “Diary of a Plunge Year” (Spring-Summer 2025 Intima) and my short story “The Other Son” (Spring-Summer 2026 Intima). Both explore how rituals, whether running beside the ocean or gathering around a table, allow people to live alongside loss without being entirely consumed by it.
Read moreOn “The Difficult Patient” and the efforts to mediate ER doctors’ hearts by nocturnist Thomas Robey
Neurologist Kendra Peterson explored reactions to “The Difficult Patient” in her poem (Fall 2017 Intima) nearly a decade ago. Long before chart cloning and copy forward worked their way into the documentation of the clinical relationship between patient and physician via the keystrokes and dot phrases of the electronic medical record, caregivers have developed shortcuts of stereotyping and rapid assessment that make their lives easier. Clinical gestalt is often celebrated, while bias is treated as something separate from it. And is the label “difficult” any different than the convenience of using yesterday’s assessment as the foundation for today’s decisions? Is propagation of a name or a label such as ‘difficult patient’ a type of plagiarism?
Read moreWhat the Midwife Knew and I Learned by physician Guilherme Coelho
Nancy Glass’s Field Notes essay “What Did La Abuela See?” (Fall 2019 Intima) put me back inside a room I had stood in once, half a hemisphere away, on a wooden floor that smelled of cedar and boiled water.
Read moreThe Voice that Lingers: On role models, inheritance, and the impact that outlives us: A reflection by emergency medicine pioneer Kenneth Iserson
No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician. He simply was the reason, the best person in his son’s entire world, and the choice followed as naturally as breathing. The acts of the forefathers, an ancient maxim holds, are symbolic for their children. Identity is inherited before it is chosen.
Read moreThe Evolution of Anecdote to Story and Beyond by Angus Woodward
My father was a raconteur, and as his dementia advanced, he often got caught in anecdotal loops. In the middle of a familiar story, he would forget that he had told the beginning, repeat it, then charge through the middle before backtracking again, cycling through the tale until some kind of interruption saved him and his listeners.
Reading Samantha Stewart’s poem “Stingray” (Spring 2022 Intima) made me think about how experiences can become anecdotes, which may turn into stories, which may evolve into legends. And I saw how personal legends connect the dying to the living.
Read moreWhat Remains When the Body Is Taken Apart: A reflection on the educational ritual of anatomy class by Elli Lee
© Seeds of Life by Elli Youngeun Lee. Oil and colored pencil on canvas
“The first time I saw a dead body was in the cadaver lab. Behind fogged glasses, I felt my chest tighten as I faced my willed donor. But soon after, I found myself dissecting layers of skin and rifling through organs with the detachment of studying pages of a textbook. Anatomy lab is a pivotal step in our medical education. In fragmenting the human body as deidentified pieces of knowledge, it guides our hands through the otherwise unseen subjects of disease and reinforces our interconnectedness. In ‘Seeds of Life,’ the flowers honor these physical bodies as vessels of the donors’ time on earth—reminders that, through their gift, our growth and our future patients’ healing take root.”
In “Seeds of Life,” I reflected on the first time I encountered death—not as a moment of mourning, but as an educational threshold. In the anatomy lab, my donor’s body became a site of learning: layers to be dissected away, structures to be identified, systems to be mastered. Standing before the body, I dreaded the day we would come face-to-face with our donor and dissect his facial structures. Yet when that day arrived, the emotions I anticipated were absent. Without my noticing, a transition had occurred: this encounter with death was no longer about loss, but about participation in an educational ritual. Though this shift felt necessary and even expected, it left behind a quiet unease. In learning to see the body clearly, I wondered if I was learning to stop seeing.
Read moreBaselines, Self-Exams and Thoughts about Mammograms: A reflection by Rebecca A. Efroymson
We all approach mammograms differently. For most of us, they’re a necessary annoyance. Others dread that genetic probabilities and possibilities will catch up with them. Still others don’t think about mammograms. They focus on the problem of the day rather than on prevention.
My breast cancer was detected with a self-exam. My doctor felt nothing abnormal and sent me home. After some self-doubt, I saw evidence of that tumor on a mammogram. The spider image changed my relationship with regular scans.
Read moreMeet Your First Patient: A Reflection on Medical School’s Anatomy Lab by Pallavi Kenkare
Anatomy lab is a medical school rite of passage. Every year, as summer cools into fall, thousands of naïve, eager First Years across the country meet their very first patient. Facing one’s donor is an emotional moment for many. It can be a carousel of apprehension, fear, gratitude and peace, but there is also an inevitable feeling of loss as the semester progresses and those poignant aches settle into a cooler, business-like approach.
Our donors are our first patient, our teachers—and they can also be our loved ones, our family, our friends, ourselves.
Read moreOn Laughing Through the Pain by Albert Einstein College of Medicine medical student Moshe Gordon
Perusing Intima's last issue, I noticed some overlapping themes between two very different pieces: my own fictional piece “Sweet Dreams,” and “Humor As (Narrative) Medicine,” an autoethnographic study by Alyse Keller Johnson, an associate professor of communication studies at CUNY Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn.
Read moreMemories of Home: A Reflection about Alzheimer’s and a Mother Who Wanted to Go Home by writer Annette Leddy
The imagery in Beyond the Threshold by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed, reminds me of my mother when she had Alzheimer’s, of which my story “Mirella”(Fall 2025 Intima) is a fictional portrayal. My mother, displaced in a memory facility, talked often of the homes where she had lived. She got them all confused, but one thing was clear: She wanted to go home.
Read moreWhat Do Doctors Get From Name-Calling? A reflection about our reaction to ‘difficult patients’ by nephrologist and educator Joseph Zarconi
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...”
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