The act of writing allows us to not only express intimate emotions, but also preserve the most sacred of stories. Storytelling, after all, is at the very heart of medicine. Listening and appreciating these stories, therefore, is just as important as representing and preserving them.

Patients often accuse doctors of having a "God complex." Maybe it is the patients who turn doctors into gods. Maybe we need to look beyond that one function of healing. Maybe we need to see the doctors as human beings.

Holly helps me befriend “high-tech,” perhaps for the first time—I can clearly picture those frozen embryonic cells as babes-to-be. And I’m transported back to hard-scrabble Glasgow, Scotland. To Annie, a fourteen-year-old lassie from the Gorbals, Glasgow’s biggest slum, who’d just given birth, on New Year’s Eve, 1973, to micro-preemie twins (father unknown). Far from being yearned for, these new arrivals were decidedly unwelcome—at least to their great-grandmother, already raising three other children, alongside Annie, in a single tenement room with a multi-family outdoor privy. 

“How many voices do I hear I in a day?” asks Susan Hannah in her piece “Voices” (Field Notes, Fall 2011).  Twice I read that line and twice I heard my story’s main character, Holt Worliss, speak in his slow, Kootenay drawl: “Well, how many didn’t ya hear?  Not mine — not my daughter’s.”  

Mayhew and McArthur focus mainly on the value to patients and families of having nurses “courageously” see their patients’ experiences and document those observations with compassion. In these narrative records, which clearly move beyond the confines of formal healthcare documentation, it seems important to also recognize that, in formulating this narrative for others, the nurse also benefits on a personal level. 

Adler’s poem illustrates with elegance what I experienced personally and what my wise patient tried to teach me. If there is anything good about Parkinson’s, pulmonary fibrosis or any other chronic, incurable disease, it is the time it gives to remember, to appreciate, to love in spite of a different theology or political leaning and time to prepare for the inevitable appointment that modern medicine might postpone, but never cancel.

Humor does productive work. Successful jokes are those that require us to synthesize information and make new meaning.  Then is it any real surprise to see humor at work in stories about those moments that are often also the most difficult? Situations of illness and disease; caregiving and hardship; life and its inevitable loss.

 When I contemplate the relationship between my piece and Emmanuelle Descours’ I can’t help but recognize the two essential pillars upon which a healthy, ethical, personal, and effective clinical encounter may occur: 1) the act of telling and 2) the act of listening.             

I was 19 when my mother died, 19 and an only child and a senior in college and questioning my sexuality and uncertain about my future and now lacking in close relationships, familial or otherwise. 

Terrible though the subject of Tim Cunningham’s 'The Sunshine Chairs' is, set in an Ebola Treatment Unit in Sierra Leone; intense as it was to hear it read by the author, an emergency pediatric nurse who returned to New York to complete a DRPH in Public Health; and undercut by the loser-chance inbred in an epidemic, the story ends with an uplifting glow. 

Across a century, writing in a diary was an effective way for nurses to capture details of time spent by their patients in a critical care ward, a military ward, a palliative care ward. I studied each of these contexts diligently to draw out the similarities of language, of shared technical skill sets, of value.

Emily Mahew and David McArthur's article on diaries makes a good case for the value that inclusion of patient and practitioner perspectives in a written format can bring to an illness experience. It was the complete lack of this perspective that drove my research on Mary Ely, whose story had to be reconstructed largely from newspaper accounts.

In my poem “Borrowed Car,” I suggest that life-threatening illness may transform the body into an unfamiliar vehicle over which a person no longer feels she has ownership or control. This loss of perceived ownership may begin with the naming that comes with diagnosis, an act of labeling that seems a necessary part of the treatment process. However, as Arlene’s Weiner’s speaker demonstrates in “Line of Beauty,” a patient may ultimately resist certain labels and perceptions of her body as a means of reclaiming authority and determining what the literal and metaphorical scars of illness will signify.

As I read the fall literature in Intima, one that I kept coming back to was “Needle” by Sara Backer. I love her poem because it shows that for every question there are two answers.

Driving home on the loop, I was struck by a mix of emotions as I both mourned and celebrated the replacement of a breastfeeding billboard for a different public service announcement. 

Lisa Kerr’s poem, “The Borrowed Car,” resonates deeply. It captures with great poignancy the ordinary moments we experience before we are struck by a sudden diagnosis, or the possibility of one. 

After reading Again by Randy Hale, I felt that we have both gone through the same life-changing medical course: she, breast cancer; me, primary lateral sclerosis that for several years had the potential to morph into ALS.

Moral and ethical considerations can greatly increase the complexity of medical decisions. The dilemmas described in Ellen Kolton's essay (“Ethics Consult: To Tell or Not to Tell;” The Intima, Spring 2015) and those that I experienced as a military doctor (“The Moral Matrix of Wartime Medicine;" The Intima, Fall 2015} share a similar frustration – the inability to find “correct” answers for difficult questions. 

In the Intima Fall 2013 edition, Dan Luftig confesses a secret: he wants an anonymous person to have a stroke during his first hospital rotation. In his Field Notes piece: “Paradoxical Wishes,” Luftig describes this furtive hope. It seems a logical way of attaining every ounce of knowledge and skill through first-hand experience. He recognizes his inner quandary as he “hopes” to rid himself of the “hope” that his patients have a specific diagnosis that he, because of his education, suspects they have. He struggles with the disconnect between his wishes as a doctor and his patient’s wish for health. What a strange juxtaposition.