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.
Access
Details
Language: English
Type of Story: Brief story
Medium: written
Contributed by: Daena Goldsmith
Citation:
Bishop CM. Amid the Wait. JAMA. 2024;332(16):1333–1334. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.17479