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
When Dads Fail
My youngest son Camron, was only ten years old—and he was feeling bereft, because he’d lost all connection to his friends. His iPad was on the fritz, less than a year after we’d purchased it.
Camron had yet to dive into the electronic age as his classmates had done. Mostly he played outside with his dogs and cats, fed and chased his goats and bounced on the trampoline with his brother. But during the one hour per day when we permitted him to play games online with his friends, he grinned from ear to ear and laughed nonstop.
Now his iPad had quit working.
What I Know By Heart
Knowing things by heart usually means having them memorized, at your fingertips. Song lyrics, birthdays, phone numbers, the poem I learned in second grade.
These days, for me, knowing by heart is a different exercise. What I know by rote, what I remember, are the dosages of medications, their side effects, and illnesses that can mimic or interact with various behavioral conditions. Hypothyroidism can look like depression; palpitations aren’t always panic attacks. I have medical knowledge, learned in school and accumulated over many years.
What I know by heart, though, is different.
Turning the Tables
My iPhone screams me awake, as it does every morning. Recently this incessant screeching has become less irritating, as I’ve grown more accustomed to the demands that clinical education makes on a third-year medical student. I begin my routine: shower, scrubs, microwaved breakfast sandwich, then out into the dark morning, actually looking forward to my day.
I’ve been on a roll in my new family-medicine rotation, enjoying my time with my supervising doctor and learning quickly under her tutelage. It feels as if it’s coming together—the pages upon pages of textbooks and notes replaced by real patients and newfound responsibilities.
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
Diversity
April 2025
Dementia
March 2025
Bravery
February 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
Vital
Everyone is nice to me. First night
through morphine I hear nurses saying
they’ll keep me on the surgical floor,
refuse to send me to the cancer unit.
They know I’m healthy, rich with lifeblood–
why view the damage this disease could do?
Physical Therapy
This morning a volcano
turned back into a neck,
simply a neck.
Decades after a tiny
muscle knot had wandered
or was pushed up
under the skull’s tight base,
this morning it emerged,
brimming with thanks.
Mementos
When you were days from
Dying
In that hospital bed
A woman came to talk to me
I knew that drill
I recognized the soft approach
