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 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 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 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 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 morePoetry’s Use of Metaphor for What Happens Inside and Outside the Body. A reflection by writer R. A. Pavoldi
Though just in my late 30’s at the time, my doctor referred me to a cardiologist because of a family history of heart disease
Visiting the family cemeteries often, the stones then looked back with deeper meaning. Men dying in their 30’s and 40’s. Heart disease, death certificates read. Still, no big deal, I got a heads-up, and had options they never had the luxury of.
My poem “LDL” was written during an old house renovation and preparing for an anatomy and physiology exam (I was also patching together a non-traditional Bachelor’s degree). I found it peculiar that I had no real fear of death, only of being somewhere without my wife.
Read moreTwo Doctors, Two Cancer Diagnoses by Susan Schuerman Murphy
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.
Read moreFear of Loss: A reflection by medical student and Intima editor, Grace Yi
In “Mathematical Fix | ation” (Fall 2023 Intima), Laura Pinto describes the slow decline of her father’s ability to communicate. She tries her best to accompany him along his inward spiral of dementia, in which he has become completely fixated on arithmetic and logic, to the point that she calls him “Professor” rather than father. I am struck by the small joys she discovers in his lucid moments at the end of his life, such as when he calls her by name, only once, in the way he did when she was young. Putting myself in her shoes, I wonder if I would have the grace and openness of heart to delight in similar moments, as untethered as I imagine I might be in the face of impending loss.
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