This remarkable compilation includes patient stories as told through the eyes of pre-medical students, medical students, and some faculty tasked with truly understanding those who are seeking medical care. The sites of these interactions vary from small town clinics to a locked hospital psychiatry unit and afforded a rare unhurried interview where the patient could just respond to "What do your doctors need to know about you to take good care of you?" and simply "Tell me about your life" and "What's next for you?"
Using a 55- word piece or a longer essay, the writers worked to determine the meaning of each story. Perhaps equally important, they considered how just serving as witness to the telling moved them along their path to being the physician they aspire to become. The works span the time before, during and after the COVID pandemic. The writers considered the fear of medical workers for their own safety, the anxiety obvious on the masked faces of the patients, and how the doctor-patient relationship was forced to adapt. Political divisions about masking and vaccination crept into the exam room, and the students occasionally expressed feelings of separateness from those patients at the far ends of that spectrum.
No reader can leave this experience without a visceral connection to the depths of human misery or a renewed appreciation for the resilience of the human spirit, although not always expressed in conventional ways. This book is good reading for anyone interested in the richness of daily human life.
