Sharing personal experiences of giving and receiving health care A premier narrative medicine and medical humanities resource
Sharing personal experiences of
giving and receiving health care A premier narrative medicine
& medical humanities resource
Surviving with Sisyphus
The patient in room 214 asks me and my attending if we can sit him up in a chair and bring him a Bible. He has a non-survival injury; wires and tubes tether him immovably to the bed. Even so, we tell him yes and leave the room. A medical student on a mission, I go in search of a chair.
Two doors down, the patient with no hands—they were amputated several days ago—yells out to the hallway:
“Hey! Hey! Is that Black man still out there?”
“Out, Out, Brief Candle!”
I grew up in a multigenerational two-family home in Queens, New York City, during the 1960s and Seventies. Every weekend, my grandparents prepared a feast for the whole family. Among them were my mother’s younger brother, Marvin, and his wife, Inge, an artist who’d immigrated from Germany.
They were childless, but Marvin delighted in his four nieces, including my sister and me. A professor of Shakespearean literature, he read Macbeth and King Lear to us when we were young, along with the more child-friendly works of Lewis Carroll.
The Call
I sink into the plane’s window seat, shade pulled down. My eyelids droop toward sleep. Next to me, headphones in place, my husband catches up on the latest Captain America movie.
I can almost forget that our young son and daughter sit in the row behind us, silent and still, plugged into the iPad for reruns of Good Luck Charlie. They sip the Cokes they never have at home. Together, we fly to Arizona for winter break. After months of working ten- to twelve-hour days as a physician in Connecticut, my body, mind and spirit ache for rest and sunshine.
I hear a distant announcement overhead, and one word grips my attention and snaps my eyes wide open:
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
Longing
February 2026
Nursing
January 2026
House Calls and Home Care
December 2025
New Voices
Stories by those whose faces and perspectives are underrepresented in media and in the health professions.
The Distance Between
I was in secondary school in Nigeria when I first noticed the lesion on Uncle Eze’s lip. Like many men of his age in Lagos, he’d picked up smoking in the 1980s, when foreign cigarette companies flooded our markets with glossy advertisements and promises of sophistication. The habit stuck, even as the glamour faded. The streets of Lagos were dotted with tobacco vendors then, selling single sticks to businessmen who’d made cigarettes part of their daily routine.
“It’s nothing,” he said, when I pointed to the growing sore. In those days, seeing a dermatologist meant traveling to one of the few teaching hospitals in the country. Uncle Eze, my mother’s eldest brother and the owner of a thriving electronics shop, had his business to run, customers to meet. The lesion could wait.
“Teach to Fish for Tomorrow”
It’s a typical Friday night in New Orleans. The streets are brimming with people from all over the world looking for a night of fun in the Big Easy.
I check the time: 5:45 pm. It’s a little more than a mile from my apartment to Ozanam Inn, a shelter for the unhoused where I work as the coordinator for the student-run Tulane Tuberculosis Screening Clinic Program. My shift tonight runs from 6:00-8:00 pm.
A Different Kind of Different
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Every parent likes to think their child is one in a million. What if you’re the parent of an individual who is more like one in 326 million?
Society in general has started to be more cognizant of disabilities—some disabilities more than others. For instance, Down syndrome awareness and acceptance has excelled in the past several years, and schools have made efforts to teach inclusion and acceptance of students with special needs.
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Poems
To My Son, Stillborn, January 16
Your death seared my cells,
fired them with you;
in one way, you left
me as your body slipped
from mine, 41 years ago,
but in another way, you
entered me;
Catching Cold
It’s sleeting outside but
I slant through the slashing
Slivers of ice unscathed
An old woman is waiting inside
Saying you’ll catch the death of you
As she hands me a heavy blanket
Another Husband in the Waiting Room
From the sixth floor of the surgery tower
two blocks from a frozen Lake Michigan,
I can see a small lighthouse but no boats.
The overcast lake is speckled blue and white
near shore, but far out on the horizon, it’s dark
like a new bruise before the healing begins.
