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
During the month of September - Pulse is accepting Poetry submissions.
Alice
Lying stuck in my hospital bed during the latest of many hospital stays, I reflected on the drastic turns and changes my life had taken.
For ten years I’d enjoyed a busy, fulfilling life as a pediatrician, educator and writer. Then, in the summer of 2020, my life had lurched from 100 miles per hour to a full stop. I’d become progressively weaker and easily grew winded when walking.
The Quiet Work of Dying
The first thing I remember is the sound of oxygen at night.
It was my second week as a hospice nurse. I had just pulled up to a modest home on a cul-de-sac, the kind of place where wind chimes echo off empty sidewalks. Inside, a man in his seventies was dying of end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. He was surrounded by family, but it was that soft hiss—steady and rhythmic, like an artificial tide—that centered the room.
His breathing was labored, yet peaceful. His wife sat beside him, holding one hand.
Dr. Poetry
You may imagine that this story will be about how poetry heals. And poetry does heal, but this story is not about that. Rather, it is a story of healing made possible by the relationship between physician and patient—of the power of words and metaphor, of being with and feeling seen, and of the human potential for posttraumatic growth.
We met on the eighth floor of the university hospital, after I was admitted for neutropenic sepsis (a serious infection coupled with low white-blood-cell count and often linked to cancer treatments) and a pulmonary embolism.
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
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,
“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
A Different Kind of Different
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
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Poems
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
Common Cause
Sitting before me
I measure his scars and record the beatings
He is broken
Not just his teeth and back, his will is
Time & Again
COVID wards 2020-2021
For the sake of the present / let’s just admit that thigh-deep mud & poison gas
