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A moving look at the challenges and triumphs of caregiving, told through candid literary accounts by more than 60 doctors, nurses, and other healers
Where It Hurts invites us to peer into the space between health and illness, life and death, through the voices of the people who work on medicine’s frontlines: doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more. In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, they share what it’s like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going.
By turns conversational, spare, urgent, poetic, plain-spoken, heart-rending, and heart-mending, each piece offers a glimpse into the extraordinary daily realities of those charged with taking care of us at our most vulnerable.
- A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself while performing a life-saving procedure.
- A nurse wrestles with caring for a woman accused of murder.
- A neurologist recalls how learning the art of pole dancing helped her through residency.
- A GI fellow serves us an unorthodox “cure” for an ER regular with a dangerous love for fajitas.
- A surgeon-poet imagines inviting Death over for tea.
Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, hate, wonder, joy: They’re all part of a day’s work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.
“In this collection of more than 60 essays, short stories, and poems, health professionals candidly and tenderly consider the work that they do, what it means to them, and its emotional impact.”—Booklist
“In Where It Hurts, sixty-three medical professionals—talented writers all—narrate the challenges of ministering to the sick, among them a teen who attempted suicide, a child who needs a pediatric intubation, a dead nineteen-year-old whose harvested kidneys will save a recipient’s life, a dying COVID-19 patient in the ICU, and dozens more. I’ll not soon forget the voices of these dedicated physicians, nurses, teachers, and technicians who treat their patients with humanity, compassion, and humility. I was riveted and moved by this collection.”—Wally Lamb, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of She’s Come Undone and The River Is Waiting
“Where it Hurts is a powerful anthology with its origins in caregiving, and the pain and suffering that invokes it. The humanity of these poems, stories, and essays makes for compelling reading, an opportunity for spiritual enlargement, and a reminder of why medicine is so much more than service.”—Thomas McGuane, author of A Wooded Shore and The Longest Silence
“The honest, heartbreaking, and uplifting voices of doctors and nurses, EMTs and medical students not only bring us behind the scenes of surgeries and intubations and autopsies, but also let us into their hearts and minds, inviting us to bear witness to everything from the giggle of a pole dancing neurologist to the wailing of a mother who learns her baby has no heartbeat. This book will continue to echo long after you finish it.”—Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Knitting Circle and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
“For far too long clinicians have been trained to believe that our worries, doubts, griefs, and even our joys are somehow different from those of our patients, that these feelings should be hidden, or even that they don’t exist. This glorious collection explores the full range of emotions caregivers experience from early career through retirement. Clinicians and patients alike will return to this book again and again to be reminded of our common humanity.”—Suzanne Koven MD, MFA, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician
“Doctors and nurses are people too—multi-layered, mysterious human beings with complex emotional reactions to the care they provide and the patients they encounter. Ranging panoramically in perspective and tone—from the haunting experiences of adolescent psychiatric nurse Jennifer Anderson in “Managed Care,” to family physician Joanne Wilkinson’s confrontation with her own powerlessness to help a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s in “Invisible,” to infectious-disease doctor Ben Goldenberg’s charming paean to hospital gift shops, “For the Old Man Buying a Stuffed Giraffe”—this collection offers readers grand works of literature in miniature. Each piece is a perfect morsel of perception: a window into the soul of a caregiver and a mirror for the reader’s reflection. A testament to the power of narrative medicine, Where It Hurts belongs on every healer’s nightstand.”—Jacob M. Appel, MD, author of Who Says You’re Dead?
“Where It Hurts gathers voices from the intimate, vital space between clinicians and patients, tracing the invisible threads that connect body and story. The writings in this collection reveal the emotional core of medicine—tender, raw, and deeply human.”—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Doctors Feel and editor-in-chief of Bellevue Literary Review
“Gritty and abrasive. Brutally honest and forged with sweat equity and spilled blood. Where It Hurts is a collection of essays and poems that will seize your heart. Even when I wanted to retreat and calm my soul, I kept turning the pages. True stories of immeasurable grief and self-doubt tiled alongside the splendor of rebirth and the wonder of curiosity. This is writing performed by experts with lived experience, who know the guttural pain of fractured clinician-patient relationships and the holiness of covenant. What does it mean when your vocation puts you face-to-face with tensions born of racism and religious blindness? How do I as a physician reconcile my own judgements and righteous anger alongside my pledge to cure and care? My shame-induced isolation was broken and my pride exposed. Suicide, addiction, personal trauma, and moral injury. Glory, beauty, empathy, and love. Open the covers of Where It Hurts and all these will be yours. But be prepared. These words will occupy your mind and stir in you uncomfortable questions long after you’re done.”—Wes Ely, MD, physician-scientist and practicing intensivist at Vanderbilt University, and author of Every Deep-Drawn Breath
“This magnificent collection offers an intimate view of the heartbreak, compassion, awe, inspiration, frustration, and love that knit together the fabric of clinical practice. The authors’ eloquent voices reveal their deep understanding of themselves and of what it means to be human. Where It Hurts bears witness to the suffering of those we care for as well as the challenging, sacred work of healing.”—Pamela Schaff, MD, PhD, director of the MS in Narrative Medicine program at USC’s Keck School of Medicine
“Where it Hurts masterfully spotlights the humanity, humility, and vulnerability of clinicians at the front lines of health care in the United States. Often portrayed in popular media as either superheroes or automatons, health care professionals wrestle with a battleground of universal emotions—self-doubt, fear of mortality, curiosity, tenderness, panic, love, and despair. Their candid stories offer a window into the messy, poignant, and meaningful facets of the human condition.”—Erica C. Kaye, MD, oncologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
“Where It Hurts cuts to the core of what it means to be a clinician today. From Rachel Kowalsky’s instructions for “Your First Pediatric Intubation”—with lurking dragons—to the unexpected poignancy of Trisha K. Paul’s “Stroppy Sevens,” each piece in this anthology examines the beauty, the challenges, and the emotional depth of caring for another person.”—Sneha Mantri, MD, Director of Medical Humanities at Duke University School of Medicine
“Where It Hurts could easily have been called Where It Heals. The essays, short stories, and poems do not sugar coat the struggles of navigating illness. Yet somehow, the collection is a healing balm for anyone impacted by their own or someone else’s illness—which is to say anyone who is human.”—Elizabeth Lahti, MD, associate professor and director of narrative medicine at Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine
“Where It Hurts lifts the curtain on the hidden dramas of medicine. These essays and poems reveal the vulnerabilities, private reckonings, fears, and sheer joys of those on the front lines of medical care. A must-read for anyone going into a health care profession, or anyone who may need their services.”—Randi Hutter Epstein, MD, writer in residence and director of the Writing for the Public program at Yale University School of Medicine
“This rich, compelling collection will help physicians, nurses, and their patients (who are, ultimately, all of us) learn important lessons about human nature and what it means to care for each other.”—Joel Howell, MD, PhD, director emeritus of the Medical Arts Program, University of Michigan Medical School
“The nature of health and illness and the intimacies of our bodily experience are at once deeply personal and profoundly universal. Where It Hurts explores this fascinating terrain. This is a book for clinicians, educators, and anyone drawn to ponder this enterprise of living in our beautiful, perfectly imperfect bodies.”—Deepu Gowda, MD, assistant dean for medical education, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine
“The voices in this collection—wise, tender, funny, and vulnerable—pierce right to the heart of medicine, revealing those profound journeys that unfold in a moment when the stakes are high and humans care for other humans.”—Jay Baruch, MD, author of Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Creativity and Constraints in the ER
“An extraordinary collection that highlights the intersection between medical mysteries and the mysteries of the human spirit. Each piece is provocative, inspiring, resonant, humane. Brilliantly curated, this collection offers profound, clear-eyed comment on our times and what is most crucial in our lives. A book to return to over and again for insight, compassion, and courage.”—Lou Ann Walker, editor-in-chief of The Southampton Review
“The medical field can feel cold and impersonal to patients, and also to doctors, nurses, and others who work in health care. This book should be required reading for students, physicians, nurses, and anyone who has to deal with the health care system (and that includes all of us!). Highly recommended.”—David G. Thoele, MD, and Marjorie Getz, PhD, co-directors of the narrative medicine program at Advocate Health
“The relationship between medical professional and patient is like a jar filled with electrons, buzzing with high energy and almost limitless possibility. Patients arrive ready to share intimacies they allow no one else. To handle this privileged interaction properly requires enormous amounts of respect and kindness, setting aside judgment, anger, irritation, and other natural human urges. There will be tension and there will be overspills. There will be mistakes and there will be magic. This collection, assembled with care, probes this relationship to enlighten, inform, and open new perspectives. The medical profession and all of us involved in it can only benefit from its honest, respectful, and sometimes humorous examination.”—David Watts, MD, author of Bedside Manners and The Orange Wire Problem
“The riveting stories and poems collected here give us close-up pictures of hope and resilience in the face of suffering. The anthology represents a broad range of medical experiences, from fetal loss to hospice care, told with eloquent detail. As Xi Chen notes in ‘The Halo,’ ‘This is medicine’s essential task, and the source of its power: to bring language from the realm of the ideas to concrete flesh.’ Where It Hurts is a must-read for anyone who encounters illness—which, we all know, is every one of us.”—Joan Baranow, PhD, author of Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague
“What a wonderful gift we have been given by these clinicians and writers—some well-known, others soon to be. These narratives and poems give us insights, challenges, and, at times, balm for our colleagues and trainees, for those for whom we care, and for ourselves.”—Arthur R. Derse, MD, director and professor of bioethics and emergency medicine at Medical College of Wisconsin
