Krista Puttler studied fiction writing at Northwestern University and is working on her first book, a memoir of her last year on active duty in the US Navy as the Ship’s Surgeon on a deployed aircraft carrier. Her story ***“This Other Person”*** ***appears in the Spring 2023 Intima.***

On Trauma you never get the story.

The Story.

Who is this person? What is their name? Where do they work? Do they live alone or with a dog, cat, mother-in-law, infant son? Do they enjoy reggae music? Have they ever read Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s sonnet about violets? Do those fleeting purple flowers also cause them to pause every April and remember their first dreams?

Their Story.

Unfortunately, there is no time for that in the Trauma Bay. There is barely time to get the mechanism of injury, the blip of fate that caused them to become a body on a gurney, just a quivering heart attempting to regain its inherent rhythm.

Like the speaker in Emily Song’s poem, “Post-Call” (Intima, Spring 2014), I have sat on a park bench “in search of a chest less numb,” attempting to make sense of what I had just witnessed, or done, or not done to a body, “a fish caught by the sinking moon.” It is hard to treat a body on a gurney in the Trauma Bay like a person with their own unique past, present and future. There is no story to cling to.

My short story, “This Other Person” (Intima, Spring 2023), is my attempt at giving a story-less trauma patient a name, a history, a present and perhaps, a future. It is my attempt at making sense of what sometimes must happen to eventually understand any patient’s Story.

Without our stories, how is there empathy, dignity, compassion? Without our stories, we are just bodies in this life.

Krista Puttler studied fiction writing at Northwestern University and is working on her first book, a memoir of her last year on active duty in the US Navy as the Ship’s Surgeon on a deployed aircraft carrier. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Ruminate Magazine Readers Write and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize from As You Were: The Military Review and Collateral. She lives and surfs in Norfolk, VA with her husband and three daughters.