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
Pushing and Pulling
Medical training consists of years of daily pushing and pulling. As a medical student, or during residency, you are constantly pulling in senior residents for consultations to provide desperately needed guidance ensuring that you don’t hurt anyone; or else you’re pushing away those same senior residents when you finally feel, It’s okay, I got this.
If you ask for help too early, you’ll meet with stern and frustrated rebukes: “I’m busy! Why are you calling me? You should be able to manage this by now!”
But if you call too late, it’s: “Why didn’t you call me? What the hell were you thinking? You coulda killed him!”
Moment of Truth
Twenty-five-year-old male, Type 1 diabetes with recent left-leg amputation, poor glucose control.
Routine case, I figured. I was the senior endocrinologist at a community health center, teaching resident physicians and caring for medically underserved patients.
I had prepared a chair to my immediate right for the medical resident, Anna, so that by turning my head slightly away from my desktop computer I would be able to see her face clearly. Although she didn’t know it, I was deaf–and with one of my cochlear implants failing, I needed to lip-read to understand speech.
A Blink Between Love and Loss
Beep. Beep. Beep….
I stood in the operating room during Cory’s organ-donation surgery, watching the monitor as his blood pressure dropped and his pulse faded. I was a second-year medical student, just beginning my trauma-surgery rotation in an urban hospital. I remember that day as a series of blinks, each one a snapshot of moments that still linger.
Here’s how it began:
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
Motor Vehicle Accidents
March 2026
Longing
February 2026
Nursing
January 2026
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
Biopsy
Either nothing
or leukemia or nothing or
multiple myeloma or nothing
a tumor, the long needle, the shattered
bone, the blood cell count, the EKG, the EEG,
nothing, the cyst, the rash, the clot, the scream, the sigh,
the “let’s just be sure,” the “let’s rule it out,” the “this may pinch
Still Cold
On his birthday, my father tries
to eat osso buco with its tiny marrow-spoon.
He scrapes at the shank, a felled tree trunk
on his plate, raises the shreds to his lips
until we cry out, watching them spread
over the table like shame.
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;
