Type of Submission: Health Story

Heart Sounds

In this 5 minute read, a first year medical student discusses treating a patient whose family had to overcome indifference in the ER in order for him to receive treatment. Additionally, the medical student illustrates managing the unknown when assisting a patient with an advanced and nuanced condition. The student decides that the best treatment they can provide is listening to the family's complaints, fears, and happy moments in order to encourage them to keep believing in this patient's future. The story touches on cardiology as a specialty and would benefit pre-medical undergraduates as well as professional students recently starting their health profession. It highlights the importance, and difficulty, of active listening.

Pulse- Voices from the Heart of Medicine

Pulse- Voices from the Heart of Medicine is an online publication that features stories, poems, haikus, and visual works from various voices within the healthcare field. Stories come from health care providers in various roles and from patients and family members. For example, “Cultivation Also Starts With C” is a poem that uses the invasive, difficult to remove plant Japanese knotweed as a metaphor for cancer and “Another GSW” details a young doctor’s encounter with a patient who had extensive injuries from a single bullet wound, and how the experience made her consider the ramifications of gun violence in America. Length of items ranges from 40 to 400 words for written works. Each month's issue is on a theme (recent examples included Alone, Coming Undone, Unsung Heros) and the "New Voices" section features "stories by those whose faces and perspectives are underrepresented in media and in the health professions." The website offers several ways to search. For example, one can click through content by year, all the way from 2023 to 2016. When you click on a story, you can also see a lengthy list of “popular tags” that you can click on to search by subject matter. The "visual works" tab includes an option to see a slideshow of submissions, as does the "haikus" tab, which could be helpful for more efficient browsing. Other notable features are that the stories and poems tabs display a phrase from each submission as an attention-getting preview. Similarly, the “more voices” tab displays a themed photograph with each submission.

Medicina narrativa

Overview of narrative medicine: characteristics of a narrative, benefits for health professionals, basis in biopsychosocial model of medical care. Useful introduction to a course in health narratives taught in Spanish; upper intermediate reading level, 4 pps

Difficult Choices

In this 2-minute video from the Youtube channel Story Center, a mother describes the discrimination that she faced for expressing breast milk at work. The narrator draws attention to the discrimination she and many other people who breastfeed faced, and the effect that her decision to breastfeed had on her career--although she successfully pursued a complaint that resulted in compensation and promises to change policy, she ultimately lost her job. "Difficult Choices" provides a succinct example of workplace discrimination against mothers, the legal remedies available, and their limitations. It could prompt discussion about the use of personal stories for advocacy.

A Strange Relativity: Altered Time for Surgeon-Turned-Patient

This is an 8 minute video made by Stanford neurosurgen and author Paul Kalanithi before his death. He reflects on the experience of time--as a physician, seeing patients and monitoring time and now, as a person with cancer and the parent of a baby. The video could be used in a course in which Kalanthi's book is assigned, to give students an opportunity to hear his reflections in his own voice and to see images of him with his family. It is also an example of the larger issue of what physicians notice about medical practice when they become a patient themselves.

Un último acto de amabilidad íntima

Michelle Friedman describes providing home care for her estranged younger brother as he dies from advanced pancreatic cancer. She touches on difficult topics of conversation, her brother's depression, and grappling with death and religion. An English language translation of this essay is available under the title, "A last act of intimate kindness."

Meditating on Death

80 minute podcast that discusses Buddhist notions of death and dying. Emphasis is on being happy about life, noticing its impermanence and questioning the value of always seeking more (money, time, status, things). Provides a detailed contrast point to Western perspectives that could be comforting, reassuring or simply intriguing for a discussion of death and dying.

El único intérprete

"El único intérprete" describes a Colombian, Jhon who became a sign language interpreter because he saw an opportunity to improve the legal system from within the prosecutor's office. Could be relevant to (pre-) law students, legal Spanish classes, more general upper division courses, to show the struggles of those with disabilities in systems not designed with them in mind. In Spanish with both Spanish and English transcripts available. 44 minutes.

Call me Francisca

Francisca had always had difficulty getting pregnant. That is why she was exhilarated when she found out the news that she was having a baby. However, after some tests, Francisca was informed that she was HIV positive. Her doctors gave her antivirals and frequent checkups to keep her viral load low, but they did not inform her about much else. She felt guilt-ridden. When the time came for her birth, she had a C-section performed by a different doctor. After her son was born, a nurse informed her that her sterilization went well. Francisca later sued the hospital for a violation of rights. This narrative is available in a Spanish transcription and as an English translation. It originates from Chile in 2002. As a patient, Francisca's trust and rights were violated. Accessible to upper intermediate Spanish readers; transcription helps with audio. Useful for discussion of reproductive rights, women's health.

Did a famous doctor’s Covid shot make his cancer worse?

Beyond - and more important than - the medical details, this article raises questions about the power of individual stories, in this instance case studies, of what might be fluke happenings or might be patterns of rare but significant side effects of a vaccine. Deep reflection on what happened when the teller was not just a patient but a scientist, one of several authors on a peer-reviewed article reporting findings in a journal, and how his trajectory would have been lost in a randomized clinical trial but might be quite significant if put together with two or three others with similar progressions. Also significant that his radiologist and co-author was his brother; not everyone has such a keen listener to their health narrative, nor would most people be able to tell them in such detailed and credible ways. Useful for discussions of scientific knowing vs storytelling in e.g. a rhetoric or composition class; science writing (author reflects at the end on her hesitation about writing the story at all, given potential misuses and misstatements of the facts she presents); power of stories; doctors as patients.