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.

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.

The imagery in Beyond the Threshold by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed, reminds me of my mother when she had Alzheimer’s, of which my story “Mirella”(Fall 2025 Intima) is a fictional portrayal. My mother, displaced in a memory facility, talked often of the homes where she had lived. She got them all confused, but one thing was clear: She wanted to go home. 

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.

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...”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”