Type of Submission: Health Story

The emperor of all maladies: A biography of cancer.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2010. It is written by a physician who interweaves his clinical experiences as a medical oncologist with the history of cancer, including how humans came to understand that it wasn't one disease but several and how treatments were developed as scientific understanding of human bodies progressed. For example, realizing that bodies were made up of cells and that cancers were also cells rather than viruses was a big step forward in the 1840's. The work is constructed as within stories within stories, including cases of patients, biographies of scientists and doctors, and Mukherjee's own learning to become an oncologist through the inevitable trial and error of medical education. Written (almost) as engagingly as any novel, it's still a big commitment for a student or layperson and not easy to assign in small parts. It might be most useful as a background reading to get a sense of medical history generally and a somewhat soothing answer when it seems like every third person you know is dealing with cancer (partly because we're all living so long, partly because - all that other stuff).

My Life is More ‘Disposable’ During This Pandemic

Written near the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the essay discusses how triaging care and minimizing the severity of COVID (e.g., saying, "only" chronically ill people and the elderly are likely to become severely ill or die) reflects the lack of value placed on the lives of the old and disabled. The author, Rabbi Elliott Kukla, is immune compromised and a child of parents who survived the Holocast. He reflects on how people's unwillingness to give up travel or eating out to help stop the spread reflects a lack of care for those who are vulnerable. Although written early in the pandemic, the essay picks up on themes raised by disability and other activists, questioning the "return to normal" following COVID. Could be used to prompt discussion of the difference in scale between public health arguments and statistical analysis and the value of individual life and perspective this narrative advocates for acknowledging.

Poems from Life with Juniper Village

Poems from Life with Juniper Village is a project developed in partnership between the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and Juniper Village Senior Living at Brookline. The goal is to share and celebrate the lives of Juniper residents with original, individualized poems presented by local poets. The website for the Senior Living community can be found here: https://junipercommunities.com/community/brookline-senior-living/ This 2022 site is the third year of the project, which is described here: https://crdpala.org/2019/03/20/poems-from-life-with-juniper-village-literature-links-communities/ The project illustrates the power of poetry as a form of narrative for honoring life experience and promoting well-being. It is also an illustration of a community-based project that utilizes narrative arts to celebrate community and seniors.

How and Why Patients Made Long Covid

This article documents the central role of patient narratives in establishing "long haul COVID" as a phenomenon. The article explores how case studies, Tweets with a shared hash tag, and high profile news stories of individual patient experiences challenged conventional medical wisdom during the early period of COVID. The article also acknowledges that power differences in whose stories receive attention played a role in "long haul" being accepted. This is a brief article that could be assigned in conjunction with first-person narratives to explore how patient narratives are related to accepted medical knowledge, research agendas, and public health communication.

A last act of intimate kindness

"I had barely seen my brother in decades, but when time was short, he let me in." In the "Modern Love" section of the NYT, a woman describes the tenderness and connection of caring for a younger brother she was mostly estranged from through his death from cancer. She's surprised at how positive and touching it is to reconnect with him under such difficult circumstances. The story could be used to prompt discussion of end-of-life care. The brother declines aggressive treatment and his sister is with him when he dies at home. This narrative is also available in Spanish under the title, "Un último acto de amabilidad íntima."

2020 was One of the Best Years of My Life

Inêz Mália Sarmento is disabled autistic author who describes how her experience during the pandemic included growth and development. "It helped me understand even more that the world was ready, it just wasn't using its resources the right way, meaning, the world could be accessible for everyone if we wanted it to be. That made me feel a bit resentful. But it also gave me the fuel I needed to keep pushing against the grain." As a result of this access, she finished high school, began college, and made friends. She questions "going back to normal" and reducing these services.

Survivor of White House Lightning Strike Embraces third chance at life

A graduate student canvassing near the White House on 8/4/22 for a nonprofit humanitarian group (International Rescue Committee - aids people in disaster zones) was one of four people hit by a lightning strike in Lafayette Park. She was the only one to survive, despite her heart stopping twice, the second time for more than 10 minutes. She ponders the meaning of being the one to survive the experience and describes the horrible pain from burns and nerve damage that she's still suffering from. Focuses on gratitude, learned from her aunt and uncle who died of cancer years ago but were grateful to be alive up until the end.

COVID-19 through the Eyes of a Black Medical Student

Shuaibu Ali is a medical student who reflects on how his experiences growing up in an urban environment increased his risk for various health conditions. He makes the case for the importance of personal stories from individuals from historically marginalized groups as a way of personalizing statistics on health disparities and exposing conditions that create them. I have used this essay in an undergraduate narrative medicine practicum class to prompt discussion about the importance of hearing stories from marginalized groups and the power of story to mobilize social change.

Me and Mrs. Dalloway: On Losing my Mother to COVID-19

Spitzer describes caring at a distance for her mother and father with COVID. Her mother dies, and Spitzer (a literary scholar) explains how Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (a book that helped Woolfe come to grips with her own mother's death) takes on new meaning as Spitzer grieves her mother. She explains, "Reading and interpretation are how I deal with overbearing emotion, and they are also the way I am working through this grief and making it mine." She asks, "How to square the collective grief of COVID with the solitary grief of a mother's death and a father's illness?" and here, too, she finds insight in Woolfe's work, Mrs. Dalloway. The essay's concluding section describes interactions in her neighborhood and the process of grieving during social isolation. The essay could be used to discuss different ways of dealing with grief, and some of the common and distinctive features of COVID-related grief. It also points out the value of literature and personal stories in grieving processes.

On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by a Pandemic

Ward describes losing her 33-year old husband in the early days of COVID when transmission wasn't well understood and treatments were non-existent. The essay opens with a loving tribute to his individual attributes, a useful move to personalize the statistics on COVID deaths. She puts her loss in conversation with the plot of a novel she is writing about an enslaved woman who loses family and with protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The short essay is accompanied by a 14:27 minute audio reading. This essay could be used in a course to prompt discussion about health disparities in COVID and the connection between those and a larger history of systemic racism. It also gives insight into grief and loss, both individual and communal, and the ways in which story is a way of processing and acting upon it.