Maja Milkowska-Shibata, creator of “Beyond Broken: The Science of Bone Lengthening
and My Ilizarov Story” in the Fall 2024 issue of Intima expresses her appreciation for fellow graphic artist, Gianna Paniagua, whose comic, “Human Experience,” appeared in the Fall 2022 issue.

Essayist and chaplain Elizabeth Ryder, author of “String of Pearls” in the Fall 2024 issue of Intima, reflects on an essay by Anna Dovre entitled “Body of Work,” written by family medicine resident Dr. Dovre.

Medical student Tiffany Chen, author of “Coffee and Crosswords” in the Fall 2024 issue of Intima, shares an appreciation of Kirilee West’s Studio Art pieces in, “The Art of Being Here,” from the Spring 2022 issue. West beautifully depicts “hidden” moments of care, and her artwork shows different providers attending to patients and ensuring they are comfortable even when they are not fully conscious.

When I read the first reports of atypical pneumonia out of China, I wasn’t worried. Now, in hindsight, this is embarrassing to admit. But every few months, there’s something new. MERS-CoV, Zika, enterovirus D68. We watch, we wait, sometimes we prepare. Usually, the impact is small. Or, at least, the impact is far away: cruelly and unfairly, caring is the inverse of distance. So, forgive me if, at first, I did not care about SARS-CoV-2.

As I read Sarah Gundle’s essay “I Can’t Remember His Name” (Intima, Spring 2023), I recognized a young and eager clinician who felt both moved by someone’s story and inept at affecting change, a dissonance that can reverberate throughout decades of practice. I, too, remembered my earliest encounters, when my own therapeutic skin was most supple and soft, vulnerable to the bruising weights of trauma, addiction and injustice. I recognized the writer’s spontaneous tears – and the impulse to minimize and dismiss them in accordance with the guidelines of rational detachment and therapeutic rapport.

In my non-fiction essay "House of Pain" essay (Fall 2024 Intima), I discuss the problematic MS Hug metaphor, used for unpredictable and distressing chest spasms that can make breathing feel impossible. Hugs are a form of affection, except this one is not. I remember being caught off guard by the intensity of the pain. Words in Logan Shannon’s non-fiction essay “The Gold Standard” (Fall 2019 Intima) resonate profoundly: “It’s the pain that comes from nowhere, the surprise, that throws me.”

There is a tendency in times of upheaval to overestimate the agency of certain individuals. Anxieties engender a cast of heroes and villains making games of global events. But the kernels of truth in these conceptions obscure the relatively small influence such figures exert on our daily lives. Still, there is comfort in the notion that somebody, somewhere, is in charge; perhaps because it suggests that we, ourselves, possess more agency than we perceive and are not, as so often seems, simply adrift on the currents of fate.