We learn in medical school to take full social, family and physical histories with a new patient. We use checkboxes to run down the list of points in each history. We are taught to be thorough and document each answer.
The Importance of Transitions: A Reflection by Ob/Gyn Andrea Eisenberg
Transitions are equally important in the hospital as day shifts to night and night to day and we hand off patients we may have been taking care of the past 12 to 24 hours. Just as children need time to adjust to a transition, so do our patients as they transition to a new day, new staff, and possibly a new baby.
Read moreOf Humans and Aliens by Andrea Hansell
“Hospitals tend to have an extraterrestrial air. Shiny structures filled with yawning expanses of slick, sterile floors, strange beeping machines, and masked creatures with gloves cutting open sleeping bodies.”
Read moreThe Immeasurable Cost of Infertility: Reflections on Holly Schechter’s "Genealogy" by Katherine Macfarlane
It feels like I’m always talking about infertility these days. Is infertility just more common because women are waiting longer to have children? We wait longer so we have more problems? Not necessarily.
Read moreSecrets We Keep: Gaining a Perspective on Love by Kim Drew Wright
“A Mother’s Life” is part of a linked short story collection I’m working on. The collection involves how we often lose our true selves but always come back to our essential essence in the end and how often we hide parts of ourselves from those people closest to us.
Read moreWhen the Medical Mask Slips: The Contradictions of Care by Vik Reddy
Patients want caregivers to be professional and competent. At the same time, patients expect a level of compassion and empathy from medical professionals. These two impulses can be contradictory.
Read moreDoes A Poem A Day Keep the Doctor Away? Thoughts on Injecting A Dose of Culture in Medical Waiting Rooms by Debbie McCulliss
Scholars have begun encouraging doctors to gain more insight from their patients through narrative writing, especially poetry. According to Dr. Rita Charon, director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and co-editor of Literature and Medicine, “With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care” (as cited in Encke, 2011).
Read moreHow Meta-Narratives Protect and Serve Us by Maureen Hirthler
As I was writing my MFA thesis this summer, I thought daily about narrative. After all, both medicine and memoir are about stories—ours, our patients—and my MFA has been about learning how to tell stories well. Stories should move us forward; occasionally they hold us back. Sometimes the true meaning of stories takes years to uncover.
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