An emergency physician fondly looks back on an unlikely refuge within the hospital: the gift shop.
Read moreUnconscious Memoir: Seeing My Medical Emergency from Others' Perspectives by Elisabeth Hedrick-Moser
In “A Life Less Terrifying: The Revisionary Lens of Illness,” a non-fiction piece published in the Spring 2016 Intima, writer Ann Wallace notes that “The act of living and of moving forward requires a constant recursive motion of looking back and re-visioning.” I’m newly aware of that recursive motion, as my essay “Fluid” opened an unexpected conversation with my family around my bout with sepsis pneumonia.
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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