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 and medical humanities resource 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 and medical humanities resource Sharing personal experiences of giving and receiving health care
Medicine Without a Bottle
Editor’s Note: May is National Nurses Month.
When is hope medicine?
In the middle of the night, a woman’s feet quietly whisked across the hospital floor to my bed.
I was seventeen, grieving the death of my mother by suicide, and the loss of our family unit. I was the oldest, doing my best to keep everything and everyone together. My stepfather was absent, spending most of his time drinking at Lex’s Lounge. My younger siblings alternated between staying at home or with our grandparents. By all accounts, it was a confusing chapter in our lives.
Missing
I sit on the cold chair, looking at the floor.
“Yes, I know I’m depressed,” I say, then pause.
“It’s just that my mum went missing seven years ago, and she was never found.”
Another pause, my words falling away, my eyes lowering.
“Since then, I’ve never been the same,” I say. “It’s hard; it still is.”
My Demography of Grief
Sometimes life hands me stories I never could have imagined—yet, once they occur, I realize that I should have expected them all along. This story from my life in an old folks’ home is one such instance.
A little over two years ago, my family placed me in an assisted-living facility for elderly people. (Under my breath, I call it “insisted” living.)
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
Wet skin
My mother doesn’t think she’s dying,
but she’s in the ER for the third time
in less than three months while
I’m 2,500
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
Physical Therapy
This morning a volcano
turned back into a neck,
simply a neck.
Decades after a tiny
muscle knot had wandered
or
