Baselines, 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.

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Meet 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.

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On 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.

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What 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.

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Why 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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Where 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.

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The 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.”

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"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.”

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The 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.”

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

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.

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On 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.” 

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How 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.”

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