Ellen Chang’s animated short, The Dinner Table (Spring 2026 Intima), beautifully illustrates intergenerational mistranslation, and the difficulty of bridging the divide between first-generation immigrants and their children when it comes to discussions of mental health. As the animation moves between Korean and English, what the daughter intends versus what the father hears, and what the father communicates versus what he means, the dining table at the center of the short lengthens and contracts, the distance between them widening and narrowing as they grapple for understanding.
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 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 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 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 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 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 moreGoing through airport security and other awkward life moments with an ‘invisible’ disease: A reflection by breast cancer advocate Jenny Burkholder
“Living with metastatic breast cancer…I dance, practice yoga, walk, parent my children, show up at school events, go on dates with my husband, and enjoy a glass of wine. So when I tell people that I will be in treatment for the rest of my life…they are incredulous.”
Read moreMy Illness, My Story: Graphic Medicine and Narratives by Maja Milkowska-Shibata
Maja Milkowska-Shibata, creator of “Beyond Broken: The Science of Bone Lengthening
and My Ilizarov Story” in the Fall 2024 issue of Intima expresses her appreciation for fellow graphic artist, Gianna Paniagua, whose comic, “Human Experience,” appeared in the Fall 2022 issue.
Un/Burdened: A reflection by physician/poet Ryan Boyland about empathy, self-care and shared joy
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.”
Read moreDeepening Insights on Metaphors for Pain and Medical Care by Vilmarie Sanchez-Rothkegel
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.”
Read moreWe Are Not Amazons: A Reflection by Medical Illustrator Mesa Schumacher
In my professional role as a medical illustrator, I'm often drawn to a good metaphor. As a patient, the allure of metaphor can be dangerous.
Read moreGiving Up Metaphors: A reflection about how we talk about illness by poet physician Ronald Lands
In both the literary world and in the clinical world, metaphors take hold of our relationship to illness and health.
“Giving Up the Fight,” by Rebeca Stanfel (Spring 2023 Intima) is a first-person account of her struggle with sarcoidosis and the metaphors that complicated her ability to deal with it. Well-meaning friends and family assailed her with encouragement that depicted chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost.
Read moreBig Moments are Surrounded by Little Moments: An End-of-Year Reflection by doctor Rory O’Sullivan
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.
Read moreSearching for the Nugget of Connection by Kristin Graziano, DO, MPH, FAAFP
During the 10 years my mother spent in her nursing home two states away, I struggled with feelings of guilt and remorse. She suffered from dementia, requiring 24/7 care, and I couldn’t provide it to her. Yet there was always the plaguing thought that I should. I knew it wasn’t realistic. Still, I felt inadequate and like I abandoned her, even though I visited every few months.
Read moreArt as a Body’s Blessing: A Reflection by physician-poet Sarah Piper
Even with the astonishing knowledge of medicine, the anatomy of an illness cannot fully be known from the outside. It takes an act of tender and careful acquaintance. And the only one who can truly map the illness of a living being is the occupant of an ill body. The geography of sickness is mysterious: its borders begin vague, its peaks conceal its valleys, its oceans rove and deepen and rearrange patterns of flood and firm ground.
Read moreThe Unexpected Labor of Caregiving by Ann E. Green
The poem titled, “To the Woman at My Mother’s Funeral Who Thought It Was So Lovely that My Mother Died at Home” by Kathryn Paul (Spring 2022 Intima, Poetry), circles around my mind days after reading it. Paul’s poem eloquently speaks back to the assumption that it is always good to die at home, that home deaths are always peaceful. The literal hands-on work of caregiving—the cleaning of blood, mucus, urine and feces — is unspoken and generally done by women, whether paid or unpaid, and the writer, who in her bio calls herself “a survivor of many things” captures this in her poem.
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