The Emotions of Medical Folk

Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine, 2026, ed. by Donna Bulseco, Intima Journal.

What I love about this book, among many reasons, is that it shares the emotions of the people who cope with stress, fatigue, and burnout as they care for people, day after day, who are seriously ill. The accounts cover the gamut of care by doctors, nurses, EMTs, and therapists who speak of the emotional toll on them, especially when they have to deliver bad news. This is a side of our doctors and nurses that we seldom see.

In terms of disclosure, my father was a doctor and my mother was an RN, but they seldom talked about their work, or their struggles, with such openness. My dad had to leave his family practice in a small Wisconsin town because being on call 24/7 broke his health. I’m also a cancer patient, and I’ve seen a great many doctors, nurses, specialists, and technicians over the last four years who have not always been chipper, yet I’ve never doubted the quality of their care. 

Collected from the pages of Intima, there are more than 60 writings by medical people who work in tense situations where mistakes cannot prevent patients from dying. The variety of how the stories are told through essays, poems, and fictional stories provide examples for how we can write about our own medical experiences. 

The book opens with a cool forward by Rita Charon In 2000, Charon created the field of “narrative medicine” at Columbia University to encourage doctors to share their medical stories with each other as a way of improving care. The sharing of our stories is also the sharing of the meaning in our lives. As Donna Bulseco, the editor of Intima, says in her introduction, narrative medicine uses literature to teach doctors, nurses, and patients how to listen, interpret, and respond to stories about health and illness. What makes these accounts so powerful is that they share intimacy and vulnerability, in other words, what makes us fully human.

The section headings give you an idea of the territory that is covered: Wrangling Dragons: self-doubt; love and hate; shame and anger; Lost in Translation; loneliness and loss; The Plague Years, Death Sentences: feeling mortal; and curiosity and tenderness. I’ve long admired some of the authors for their writing, like Dr. Rana Awdish who writes of the protective gear she had to wear during the Covid pandemic and having to isolate patients and families from each other; and Dr. Laura Vater who writes about how to compassionately support your patients. For the other writers, this is my introduction to their work.

It’s a balancing act for medical people to provide the best medical care to patients while also taking care of their own health so that they don’t burnout, seem uncaring, or become resentful. Whenever a patient has to see a doctor, they feel apprehensive about what the doctor is going to discover, and they need to feel that whatever it is, their doctors will do their best to take care of them. Without this trust, medical care breaks down. 

Listening is the yeast in communication. Patients start with emotions; doctors start with medical details. Doctors and nurses need to listen to patients talk about what they think is physically wrong, and how the treatments are making them feel. Patients need to listen to their doctors and nurses for what they are saying. Both sides need to ask what the other means when they don’t understand, and both need the humility to ask for help when they need it.

Every account in the book touches the heart: the nurse who has to tell a mother that her baby is stillborn, an EMT person who struggles to keep a succession of people alive until they can get to a hospital, the story of an aging surgeon whose skills are slipping but doesn’t know how to stop, the emotions of a third year resident who assists in harvesting organs for transplant from a donor who is not much younger than himself, the man who can’t stop eating fajitas and keeps ending up in the Emergency Room.

This collection belongs on the shelf of patients and health providers who care about the emotional health of every human in the medical system. It will reassure one and encourage the other.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow