Health Story Type: Brief story

Imagine What It’s Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology

This wide-ranging anthology includes literature from a variety of historical periods, genres, and authors (a range that includes John Milton, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Louisa May Alcott, and Dylan Thomas as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, Rachel Naomi Remen, and Rafael Campo). It is organized by topics, including the experience of illness, beginnings and endings (on death and birth), trauma and recovery, coming to terms (on the time "after catastrophe, diagnosis, rescue or death," and healing costs (the experiences of caregivers, both professional and familial). In addition to 65 works (most of them 2 to 5 pages in length), the volume also includes a list of "suggested longer readings" and "notes on authors and selections."

Between the Heartbeats: Poetry & Prose by Nurses

This collection of writing includes a diverse range of international voices. They address a variety of experiences of care, including in-patient, out-patient and home care. As the title indicates, the collection spans poetry, brief stories, and reflections, all previously published elsewhere and collected here. In the Foreward, Joanne Trautman Banks observes that the works addresses not only personal experience but also reflections on the limitations of the profession.

Medicine, Meaning, and Identity: Essays from Early-Career Physicians

A female resident navigates modern dating. A critical care doctor becomes one of the first physicians in the United States to contract COVID-19. A pediatrician reflects on her father's passing during her final year of medical school. A Muslim surgeon contemplates whether residency has replaced his faith. An orthopedic surgeon wonders, after a decade of training, if he made the right choices after the death of his brother-in-law. An African American resident painfully asks: Do Black lives truly matter to white coats? For decades, medical humanists have advocated for attending to patients as "whole persons." So, too, the time has come to see physicians as "whole persons." In this urgent, moving collection of essays, a diverse group of early-career physicians write about common experiences in medicine--such as the grueling nature of internship and residency--from a fresh, up-to-date perspective. With particular attention how to the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity influence clinicians' experiences as caregivers, the featured practitioner-authors reflect on endurance, suffering, and the politics of wellness across their personal and professional lives, delicately capturing a new dimension of healthcare previously unfamiliar to wider audiences. Medicine, Meaning, and Identity invites readers to reconsider the doctor not as a hero, but rather as a complex, whole person; not merely as a healer, but as an integral community member in acute need of healing.

Un chispazo de conexión humana

Agus Morales describes his visit to Faiz, a man from Pakistan, in the hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes Faiz’s shock when he speaks to him in Urdu as he had not spoken his native language since he first arrived at the hospital. The story highlights human connections that can grow from shared language, both speaking and being understood in a medical setting. This is a part of a collection that includes visual as well as written narratives regarding experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Useful for medical Spanish classes, well-told story that will resonate with general composition students, good example of a health narrative for humanities-driven upper division courses. Intermediate level, 1-2 pages.

Case Report

"Case Report" document's the author's simultaneous experiences of being a medical student and sexual assault survivor. It moves through the aftermath of the trauma living solidly in two worlds, as an insider and outsider of healthcare. This brief story describes numerous interactions with a range of health care providers, as well as interactions that occur with friends, a pharmacist, patients, and others. By showing examples of unhelpful and helpful ways people responded to a sexual assault survivor, this story can prompt important discussions about compassionate care and social support. It also provides insight into how a provider's own traumatic experiences inform their approach to medical care. Some of the interactions in the story are difficult to read so advance notice may be appropriate with some audiences.

Body of Work

Anna Dovre's story "Body of Work" is a meditation on the various ways she has encountered death through her medical education: learning to intubate on a cadaver, witnessing death in the emergency department, sitting with a hospice patient. Her essay reflects on the ways death is experienced and understood in the process of medical education and the connections and disconnections with one's own understanding of mortality. She starts her reflection with a description of her practice time in a cadaver lab and the physical benchmarks for competency when performing an autopsy. The following section about her time as a hospice companion juxtaposes personal experience with a discussion of clinical terms for ways and stages of dying. "To die actively means the pauses between breaths lengthen and stutter; the mind slips into unconsciousness; the skin begins to mottle into starbursts of purple and blue. To die inactively—well, that becomes a question of semantics, of philosophy." The story raises questions about how we honor life and make one's last moments and after death a respectful and respected process. How can we, as the living, be more appreciative of the gift of life while caring for those around us? This quotation, "If anything, the scene on the table has become more gruesome, but perhaps that has rendered her less real, less human to me," from after the autopsy is a stark realization that will inspire feelings and emotions in readers.

Amid the Wait

This personal essay, appearing in JAMA's regular "A Piece of My Mind" feature, details a health care provider Cia Merin Bishop's experience of going through unsuccessful infertility treatment while practicing medicine and caring for patients in a pediatric intensive care unit. The essay poignantly portrays the emotional experience of undergoing infertility treatment. It also speaks to what it is like to be both physician and patient and the coping, support, and resilience she marshalls in order to continue to function at work while dealing with the physical and emotional impact of her own medical treatment. The author points out that this experience is not uncommon, citing studies that suggest about a quarter of female physicians experience infertility and 31% of female oncologists reported infertility requiring counseling or treatment. As she says, "I write this piece in solidarity with other women physicians. I write this piece as an anthem of our strength. And I write this piece to acknowledge the suffering within us, as we tend to the suffering around us." The dual focus of this moving and readable essay would make it equally useful for discussions of infertility and reproductive health as well as physician stress and resilience. It could also be a useful in a course or unit on narrative medicine as an example of how physician's writing their own stories helps to humanize medicine.

Together Well: Documenting COVID’s Impact through Storytelling

Together Well is an online collection of stories (some audio and written but most video) about experiences of COVID. This collaboration between the Relational Leadership Institute (www.relatelab.org) and the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative (nwnmcollaborative.org) was designed to "collectively make sense of the pandemic’s impact on all members of the community: nurses, social workers, patients, family members, doctors, caregivers, students, chaplains, scholars, educators, activists, and artists." In addition, the stories were assembled in the hope that reflecting on pandemic experiences can provide a basis for change in healthcare and communities that "better center connection, relationships, and well-being." Stories document not only hardship but also ways that the COVID crisis led teams, communities, and individuals to innovate, collaborate, and change in powerful ways that we may wish to continue as we move forward. The 37 stories in the collection are listed on the webpage; each has a thumbnail and an image. There is also a video (the first entry in the collection) about the project. Stories are brief enough to show in a class or workshop. The videos are hosted on YouTube so it is possible to provide closed captioning and transcripts are also available.

Skin & Bones

Skin & Bones is Renée Watson’s novel about the experiences of Lena, a 40-year-old African American woman in predominantly white Portland, Oregon. Health, body image, weight, diet, and beauty standards are prominent topics throughout the book and these are contextualized within larger themes about race, gender, gentrification, work, love, faith, and friendship. There are many passages in the book that show how beliefs about health are communicated through interactions with Lena’s friends, family, romantic partners, co-workers, and service providers. For example, the book opens with a chapter entitled, “the weight I carry,” that problematizes assumptions about health and weight in an interaction with a healthcare provider. Lena’s observations about the interaction (e.g., the too-small gown, unfounded assumptions and problematic statements from the health care provider) are woven with reflections on her lifeworld. Immediately following this chapter is a brief reflection on “morbid” as a word used in relation to weight; it concludes with the statements, “Comment on my appearance. But tell yourself it’s about my health.” Health-related themes are prominent enough that one might assign the entire book and this would provide opportunities to see "big" or "fat" as an identity that intersects with race and gender and to discuss health themes in relation to sex, social support, family, and community. However, the book is also written in chapters (some only a paragraph long) that could be excerpted to explore specific topics. For example:

the aforementioned “the weight I carry” and “morbid” focus on a health care interaction
“Sunday supper” includes a reference to a mother who died from a failure to diagnose breast cancer because she was “a poor Black woman”
“shopping while fat” and “back to school shopping” address finding plus-sized clothing
“macro microaggressions” details lunch with younger white co-workers and concludes with the line, “...they sat there and basically admitted—in my presence—that of all the cares and worries to have in life, their greatest fear is having a body that looks like mine.”
“aunt Aretha” examines “soul food” and its complicated connections to health, family, race, and class
A sequence of chapters--“fat girl, dance,” “how whiteness killed the body positive movement” (an excerpt from Kelsey Miller), “debriefing,” “positivity,” “positive,” and “body positivy” address how fat acceptance intersects with race and this is taken up later in two chapters describing Lena and her friends’ experience at a “Fat Girl Wellness Conference”

One especially powerful recurring storyline involves messages about self-acceptance, health, and diet that Lena received from her own mother and what she communicates with her daughter. These are difficult chapters and include a near overdose on diet pills that is initially taken as a suicide attempt. A strong bond between Lena, her mother, and her daughter sustains them and the book addresses the complexities of communicating about health, race, gender, and beauty in our personal relationships.

“Final del juego” por Julio Cortázar

The story revolves around a young narrator, her sisters Holanda and Leticia, their mother, and their aunt Ruth. Leticia suffers from an unidentified back ailment and often directs their play. Told from the point of view of a child learning to understand disability, with emotions ranging from pity to envy: Leticia is excused from chores and catches the eye of an appealing stranger. Could begin discussion of how people with disabilities are perceived and responded to by able-bodied peers and family members, portrayals of relationships. 8 pps (4500 words); Argentinian dialect; some very funny moments.