The Afterlife and the Road to It: A Caregiver's Reflection by physician and journalist Christine Nguyen

November 21, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

© *My Mother’s Last Bed* by Meg Lindsay.

"My Mother's Last Bed" (Fall 2022 Intima) is a painting of a body almost glowing with a flame of amber, coral and luminous blue. "Driving" (Fall 2018 Intima) is a poem about hope, dread and dark humor. Both of these works spoke truth to me. I only realized later that the artist and poet were the same person, author and artist Meg Lindsay. How apropos.

What is Grief-Sight? Writer and researcher Valk Fisher reflects on what prompts it.

November 1, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

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.

How Art Inspires: Looking at “The Wish” by primary care physician Megan Gerber. A reflection by Colleen Cavanaugh

May 30, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

*© The Wish.* Megan Gerber. Mixed-Media: Acrylic, ink and tissue paper on canvas. Spring 2025 Intima

Although many of my non-fiction stories dwell on loss, there is always a lesson to be learned or an inspiration which somehow has evolved into compassion. In “The Lingerie Shop” (Spring 2025 Intima), I recall my adolescent years when I learned about my mother’s breast cancer. I was haunted by her embarrassment and loneliness. The emotions were part of my upbringing and I lived side by side with them. It must have changed me. I attended medical school and became a gynecologist, caring for many women with breast cancer. My loss had metamorphosed into strength and compassion. My loss made me a better doctor.

Two Doctors, Two Cancer Diagnoses by Susan Schuerman Murphy

May 23, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I met my husband, Kim, on a bone marrow transplant unit in a cosmic display of foreshadowing ten years before the happenings in my piece “Suffer the Little Beagles.” I was First Lieutenant Schuerman serving as a bone marrow transplant nurse. He was a Captain who had ventured up four floors to place his pathology report in a patient’s chart. Over the next decade we married, I became an attorney, we became civilians, I gave birth to our daughter, and we bought a big house. He told me about his deep bruises and enlarged spleen the night we lay exhausted on our bed after having received our household goods.

Prayers: A Reflection by Angela Tang-Tan

February 25, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I hesitated to write “Top Surgery,” and I hesitated even more to submit it. In it, I wrote that “I stand with my back to the wall, drawing silence around me like armor.”

Un/Burdened: A reflection by physician/poet Ryan Boyland about empathy, self-care and shared joy

January 24, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I leave the hospital, but the hospital doesn’t always leave me. I carry my stress in a thin band across my upper back. On the good days, I think about a patient I sent to a recovery center. I think I did a good job. On the bad days, I find myself scrolling for far too long, when another shift is coming in entirely too few hours, because, as I wrote in my poem “Omens,” “while I am awake, he is still alive.”

How to Have Empathy for Others As Well as Ourselves: A Reflection by clinician Jennifer Anderson

January 17, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

As I read Sarah Gundle’s essay “I Can’t Remember His Name” (Intima, Spring 2023), I recognized a young and eager clinician who felt both moved by someone’s story and inept at affecting change, a dissonance that can reverberate throughout decades of practice. I, too, remembered my earliest encounters, when my own therapeutic skin was most supple and soft, vulnerable to the bruising weights of trauma, addiction and injustice. I recognized the writer’s spontaneous tears – and the impulse to minimize and dismiss them in accordance with the guidelines of rational detachment and therapeutic rapport.

Deepening Insights on Metaphors for Pain and Medical Care by Vilmarie Sanchez-Rothkegel

January 10, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

In my non-fiction essay "House of Pain" essay (Fall 2024 Intima), I discuss the problematic MS Hug metaphor, used for unpredictable and distressing chest spasms that can make breathing feel impossible. Hugs are a form of affection, except this one is not. I remember being caught off guard by the intensity of the pain. Words in Logan Shannon’s non-fiction essay “The Gold Standard ” (Fall 2019 Intima) resonate profoundly: “It’s the pain that comes from nowhere, the surprise, that throws me.”

Rituals of Care: How We All Possess More Agency in the World Than We Think: A reflection by doctor Gaetan Sgro

January 3, 2025 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

There is a tendency in times of upheaval to overestimate the agency of certain individuals. Anxieties engender a cast of heroes and villains making games of global events. But the kernels of truth in these conceptions obscure the relatively small influence such figures exert on our daily lives. Still, there is comfort in the notion that somebody, somewhere, is in charge; perhaps because it suggests that we, ourselves, possess more agency than we perceive and are not, as so often seems, simply adrift on the currents of fate.

Normalizing—and Honoring—the Process of Dying," a reflection by veterinarian Jackie Greenwood

December 7, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Jen Baker-Porazinski's story “Dying at Home” (Spring 2024 Intima) drew a vivid picture of a patient and her family, and the rhythm of her last few weeks. The love and dedication of her husband was especially moving.

I was also struck by the narration of Baker-Porazinski’s journey, as a doctor. Reflexively, at each visit, she listened to her patient's heart and took her blood pressure. Baker-Porazinski felt this showed that she hadn’t given up on her patient .

Big Moments are Surrounded by Little Moments: An End-of-Year Reflection by doctor Rory O’Sullivan

November 29, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Big moments are surrounded by little moments. That’s what I was trying to pull out in my story “There’s a Special On Car Washes,” published in the latest issue of Intima. That bewildering sensation, common in life and especially in healthcare, that extraordinary things happen but that time marches on without sentimentality. You win the big game but when you get home you still have to take out the garbage. You receive a life-changing diagnosis and then you have to figure out the machine to get out of the hospital parking lot.

Witnessing Grief by pediatric hospitalist Sophia Gauthier

November 15, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Grief walks in many forms, and its footsteps are padded and quiet, imperceptible even, except to those who lay awake at night, counting its tip taps on the upper floor.

Learning to be Present for an Act of Dying by UCSF Medical Center professor Krishna Chaganti

September 27, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

It is the great privilege of medicine that we are asked to show up, constantly, albeit in a different role than a family member would be. To not look away is in the fabric of what we do. It is partly why the practice of medicine can be exhausting, electronic charting and reimbursement quibbles aside. We are asked as caregivers not to dispense always but to receive, to hear questions that we don’t want to reflect upon. It is our privilege to be present.

Thresholds and Doorways: Exploring Mental Health Narratives Through Art by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed

September 13, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

© *Beyond the Threshold* Aubrey Reed *Spring 2024 Intima*

My first-ever clerkship rotation as a medical student immersed me in the realm of inpatient psychiatry. This profound and eye-opening experience blurred the boundaries between sickness and health. It challenged my preconceived notions and deepened my understanding of mental illness.

Missing Someone: A Reflection on Loss and Yearning by Shruti Koti

September 6, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

My short story “The Waiting Room” (Spring 2024 Intima) was inspired by recent legislation that threatens women’s rights and health. In the story, a young couple is troubled by a decision they made to terminate a pregnancy – they are scared of persecution and legal action, but they are also emotionally and spiritually haunted by their choice.

The story ends as they drive away from the reproductive clinic, but it is evident they will think about that afternoon for months, and years, to come.

Can one miss something that was barely there?

Self-Examinations and the Burdens of Being Sick by Amanda Ford

August 23, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Being sick takes work. There is the pain and exhaustion, the adaptation, the cognitive load required to keep moving forward when my body holds me back. There’s also the business of being a patient: sitting in waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy, being on hold with the insurance company.

Our Body is an Ecosystem: A reflection by Jeanne Yu

July 26, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I came across two Intima pieces in conversation with my recently published poem, “Mercury, A Public Service Announcement” When I was younger, I took my body for granted. I thought medical science or pharmaceuticals would patch all my future ills. Wanting to live life to the fullest made it difficult in my busy life to do more than what was needed at that moment and then move on ... but as I age, I find my body has kept score and is less resilient.

Poetry and Palliative Care, a reflection by writer Dan Yashinsky

July 12, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I’m writing in response to Danielle Snyderman’s Field Notes essay “Not Yet, The Epilogue” (Spring 2021 Intima). I wrote the poem “The Trail to Ahous Bay” to read aloud to my friend Joan Bodger. She was in the palliative care unit of Tofino Hospital on Vancouver Island. I had come from Toronto to visit with her, and to say goodbye. I was staying on Vargas Island, a short boat ride from Tofino, and had taken the cross-island hike that became the poem.

Moving into Compassion, One Small Moment at a Time by anesthesiologist Molly McCormick

July 5, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

I think about time a lot now. My days are ruled by schedules and cases and meetings, and I spend much of my day reacting to the pressures of the unrelenting sweep of the second hand as it moves around turning into minutes and hours, never slow enough for me to accomplish everything I need to do.

Caring and the Challenges of Social Convention, by Jeffrey Millstein, MD

June 21, 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

An internist reflects on his short story as well as a fellow physician’s personal essay and explores the complex issue of crossing implicit social boundaries in the clinician-patient relationship.