Big moments are surrounded by little moments.
Rory O'Sullivan is a family doctor in Toronto, Canada, and an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Toronto. His short story, “There’s a Special On Car Washes,” appears in the lFall 2024 issue of Intima.
That’s what I was trying to pull out in my story “There’s a Special On Car Washes,” published in the latest issue of Intima. That bewildering sensation, common in life and especially in healthcare, that extraordinary things happen but that time marches on without sentimentality. You win the big game but when you get home you still have to take out the garbage. You receive a life-changing diagnosis and then you have to figure out the machine to get out of the hospital parking lot. In my family medicine practice, I might see a patient with a mental health crisis, or one concerning chest pain, or an early pregnancy loss, and then roll right into the next room to see an infected toenail. Sometimes your head spins.
My story tries to capture a certain sense that this is an unfair phenomenon. The world is hard and fast-moving and lends us no time for navel-gazing. In Intima’s archives I found a tremendous fiction piece from 2015 by writer Sara Baker titled, “The Sun in Cannes,” which seems to come from a different angle. In Baker'’s story, the vivid details of ordinary life around us seem to be a balm, a comfort, in the face of existential crisis. A hot cup of coffee, a comb through messy hair, sweeping up crumbs on a plate. Baker’s engaging and poetic prose brings out the color in the world all around us in a way that grounds the story and grounds the protagonist. Small moments, small comforts, bring light.
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. In healthcare, we are keenly aware that big changes can happen quickly. Lives can be derailed, or at least shaken, in an instant. But these changes do not happen in a vacuum. They happen as part of a web of other aspects of life. Some of the strands of this web are boring, mundane. Some are messy, like the family conflict at the heart of Sara’s story. But, for better or worse, these strands keep pulling us forward in the world.—Rory O’Sullivan
Rory O'Sullivan is a family doctor in Toronto, Canada, and an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Toronto. His written work has previously been published in Intima, Pulse, Canadian Family Physician, and The COVID Journals anthology from University of Alberta Press. He is a past recipient of the CFPC Mimi Divinsky Award for History and Narrative in Family Medicine. He has worked in a range of clinical settings across four Canadian provinces and collected amazing stories along the way. Read more of his work at roryosullivan.ca or @TheCountryMD