My mistakes are like wildfires: disfiguring the entire landscape, forests turned black and flat and charred beneath my feet. After something like that, people will always look at you like a walking natural disaster, always smell the air for smoke. I would do anything to take it back, to just pop the cap back on that bottle and move on with my life, but that didn’t happen. There’s that saying about something being a tough pill to swallow, but I guess I never had that problem. Pills were easy. Too easy.

The summer before I started high school, my dad and I moved to a small town in rural Oregon. It was deceptively picturesque, with a historic downtown and snow-capped mountains lining the horizon. My dad said it looked like a Christmas card, but to me, it felt like a snow globe. “Come on, it’s a fresh start in God’s country. It’ll be good for us,” he said. I knew the divorce hadn’t been easy on my dad, but this didn’t feel like a fresh start. It felt like a life sentence.

The town felt barren. Untouched. Lonely. Of course, there were other kids my age in the town, and I went to school with all of them. You’d think this would help with the overwhelming isolation, but it had the opposite effect. Throwing together a few hundred chronically bored, desperate-for-trouble teens is about as good of an idea as it sounds. It became us against the world, a case study in desperation and mob mentality. Without that anger and desire for more, what did we have? There was nothing for us to look forward to besides escape. Every day in that tiny school and that tiny town felt the same, like we were living in a time loop. It would almost be cool, like a science fiction movie, if it wasn't so abysmally boring. So we determined that if we couldn’t get to the outside world just yet, we would bring the outside world to us. Like the stupid kids we were, we thought the outside world was like one giant rager, so we threw some pretty killer parties. I never understood how the word “killer” could both mean something good and bad at the same time. Now I do.

Flash forward to a Friday night sometime during my senior year. We had survived yet another week of classes and teachers and homework; graduation was just around the corner. We were so close to being done. So close. Naturally, we decided to celebrate the only way we knew how: we threw a party. We kept the house dark, the music loud, and the blinds drawn. For those few brief hours in whoever’s house we were crashing that weekend, we weren’t trapped in rural Oregon. We were living in L.A. or New York or some other far away city. Our hearts slammed inside our chests, echoing the beat of the music and chanting for more, more, more. For those few brief hours, we were free.

Freedom has a price, though. That’s the part they skip in the movies. The characters have a crazy night, something goes wrong, chaos ensues as the characters try to fix whatever sticky situation they had gotten themselves into, the problem works itself out, and the characters laugh about it afterwards and have a sentimental moment. Cue happy music. Roll credits. The end. That’s not how it happens in real life. That night, we made a mistake. We started a wildfire. The moment my friend switched out a beer bottle for a pill bottle, I should have known to walk away. I should have said no, but that night, I felt invincible. I thought nothing would hurt me, not when I was so close to my life finally starting. I looked around at all my friends, drunk and high and so alive, and I took one. Oxycodone didn’t sound scary, not like heroin or cocaine or meth. They gave it to kids when they got their teeth pulled, so how bad could it be? One pill wouldn’t hurt. I had stopped saying no a long time ago.

If only I had known that one pill would turn into a habit, and a habit would turn into a full blown addiction. Soon, I had pills in my locker, in my car, in my bookbag, in my purse. Any space I inhabited on a regular basis became my drug cabinet, my hiding place. It became increasingly difficult, however, to keep my addiction going. I was in high school, and my dad would be furious if he found out. I didn’t have nearly enough money to keep buying the pills I wanted—no, needed. I found myself at a new low.

Hooked on the high and stupid enough to keep my problem a secret, I used up the last of my money from my summer job and bought heroin for the first time. It was from a kid at my school; the deal was cheap and quick. The needle was intimidating at first, but not as scary as the thought of withdrawal. The tremors, the sweating, the chills, the pain. Itching for a high in the tiny bathroom attached to my bedroom, I closed my eyes to not focus on the pinch of the needle. I didn’t think about what would happen once this high wore off. I just let the wave of euphoria wash over me and felt a sudden calm. Looking in the mirror, I could see my first bruise already beginning to show. I changed into a sweatshirt before my dad came home. I would wear long sleeves for years to come.

If taking oxycodone for the first time crossed a line, shooting up with heroin for the first time obliterated it. Every day, the drugs worked less and less, and I had to buy more and more. I was covered in bruises. Anywhere that could be hidden with jeans or long sleeves was a canvas of blue and brown bruises and puncture marks. If there was anything drugs taught me, it was that I was a good liar. It seemed I could hide anything from my dad. Until three years later, when I finally hit rock bottom.

I was in college. I mean, I was enrolled in college, but I rarely even showed up to class. My grades were slipping and my attendance was a disaster, but I could never seem to make it through the day. Not without getting high. I’d gone home early that day, exhausted and ready to add another bruise to the collection. If I had counted how many times I had felt the sting of a needle, it probably would have been enough to have given myself a full tattoo. One minute I was in the bathroom, pulling my sleeves down to hide the shameful thing I had just done, and the next, I had stumbled into my room. I laid down and closed my eyes, which is apparently how my dad found me. Prone. Unresponsive. Barely breathing. I woke up a day later in the hospital, my dad sitting next to the hospital bed with his head in his hands. He lifted his head and looked at me, my eyes red and bloodshot. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. I told him it wasn’t his fault, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. He felt the burden of my secret as much as I did. He sat there and looked at my arms, a stark picture of my addiction. He checked me into rehab the next week.

Rehab was not like the hospital. The hospital was cold and smelled like rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde. It was sterile and felt like death. Rehab, on the other hand, was filled with warm colors and art classes and friendly faces. Withdrawal felt like dying, but at least it wasn’t death. It was resuscitation. Revival. Resurrection. I left a month later detoxified and rejuvenated, ready to pick up the pieces of my life and live as if that night at that fated party never happened. Too bad good things almost never last.

I would overdose three more times. Each time, my dad sent me back to rehab with a little less hope in his eyes. I had given up a little, too. During my fourth stint in rehab, I met Rachel. She was nineteen, bone thin, and pregnant. It turns out that if you do heroin while you’re pregnant, the baby gets addicted, too. If the mom tries to go cold turkey and stop feeding her addiction, the baby also goes through withdrawal and can die. So there sat Rachel, medicated on methadone and just waiting until her nine-and-a-half month wait was up so that she could get her act together. When I asked her about her situation, she said, “If it was just me, I probably would have never gotten clean. But it’s not just me anymore, and Child Protective Services can get involved at any time. My family doesn’t think I’ll make a good mom. I need to prove them wrong. I just made a mistake. It was one time.” It was this heartbreaking admission that made me see that if I didn’t get clean, I could be in Rachel’s shoes in five, ten, maybe fifteen years. I could never drag my kids into this. Never. That was my last trip to rehab. I never touched a needle again.

Five Years Later

“And that’s how I got here. I’m almost five years clean, and I’m finishing community college in a couple of months. I already have a job lined up after I graduate.” Claps and congratulations filled the room as I announced this news, a success story that the other recovering addicts in the room could aspire to. Heroin Anonymous had taken up my Monday nights for the past four years, and in every meeting I attended I felt like I was earning my place back in society. Rachel sat across the room with her daughter, who was fast asleep in her lap. I wondered if Rachel would ever tell her what these meetings were, who she used to be. My father sat next to me, smiling and proud of my recovery.

It is true that some mistakes are like wildfires. They burn down everything that was once familiar, and you are left with only the ashes. But that’s the incredible thing about wildfires: after the flames have died down and the heat no longer persists, the scorched ground becomes green again. Life always finds a way. Things grow back. It may never be the same, but it sure is something worthwhile.

Shannon Lally is currently pursuing a double major in Psychology BS and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. After college, she hopes to pursue law in a creative field, such as book publication.

Elaine Scarry, Harvard English professor and advocate for narrative medicine, said: “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”

We can never truly know what someone else’s pain feels like, or truly understand another’s experience with illness or injury.  But we are mistaken if we think that this gives us reason not to try.

As two sophomore Nursing majors and Medical Humanities minors at Boston College, we feel a personal responsibility to give voice to stories of pain—including the suffering associated with physical, emotional, and mental illness and stress we have heard from our peers. We also feel called to elicit and validate the stories of pain which haven’t yet been told. Many suffer silently every day on campus, and our hope is to provide space for these people to share their stories and thus feel less isolated.

“Underheard HSC” (@underheard_hsc), the Instagram account we’ve launched, is dedicated to sharing anonymous short health stories and art pieces by and from college students. It aims to make stories of illness, disability, and loss in college more accessible to the students facing these challenges, to encourage those who aren’t naturally inclined to write about their experiences to share their stories, and to help those who haven’t experienced such challenges to join in conversations about health and illness with those around them.

In college, there is great stigma around diseases or injuries that are considered unusual in our age group. We are expected to be young, strong, and resilient to whatever comes our way. This presumption of healthiness makes it challenging for those who undergo debilitating illnesses to express themselves. When these experiences are under-discussed, it leads to misunderstandings about the reality of being sick, and about how to best respond to and care for those around us who are experiencing these challenges. For this reason, we are particularly interested in reaching college students through our work as interns at Health Story Collaborative.

Our hope is that Underheard HSC becomes a space where young people feel less alone in their pain and comfortable enough to submit quotes or short stories about their own health.

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Each of us has or will deal with health challenges in our lifetime. It’s time to start talking about it.  By taking the time to listen to and express care for the stories of our peers, we will not only be showing them kindness, but we will also begin to make space for a kind of storytelling which can lead to emotional healing. Our greatest ambition is to inspire better communication and deeper human connection. We hope that this platform welcomes students to share and serves to validate and honor every health story.

Supporting unique projects and starting new conversations can sometimes be scary, but the barriers to discussing the difficulties of illness which we have comfortably hidden behind until now are the very reason we must take a leap and open our minds to the infinite stories of illness and pain existing around us.  Please join us in taking a small but important step in showing our peers that we care: follow @underheard_hsc on Instagram.

For questions or to submit a story, please email Evelyn and Heena at hscinterns@gmail.com.

Heena Nissaraly is a sophomore at Boston College majoring in Nursing and minoring in Medical Humanities. She aims to become an empathic nurse specialized in anesthesia or hospice care, and hopes to eventually improve healthcare in Madagascar.

Evelyn Caty is a sophomore at Boston College majoring in Nursing and minoring in Medical Humanities.  She discovered for herself the utter inexpressibility of pain when she suffered from undiagnosed back pain for many years, and she hopes to use this knowledge to encourage her peers struggling with health challenges to begin healing through the telling of their own stories. She, too, hopes to use her passion for the medical humanities and for storytelling to become a compassionate and effective nurse.

The fact that Dominicans of Haitian descent are treated as foreigners in their own country was hinted at before we even arrived on the island. Contemporary Haitian immigrants to the Dominican Republic and prior generations experience racism and economic exploitation on a daily basis. Our Global Health service trip team was mostly white, so this discrimination would not affect me or many of the other students. However, a black girl from New Jersey was warned that if our guagua (bus) was stopped while in transit, she would likely be asked to step out by military personnel in an effort to control immigration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic. Luckily, we avoided this situation, but during my week on the island I observed many occasions of blatant racism that interfered with healthcare access for Haitians.

Each day our team traveled into “bateys” – communities – outside of Monte Cristi to support the local health center and their mission of guaranteeing patients the right to health. In the early 1900s, banana companies established bateys for the Haitians and Dominicans who worked the fields during the day, to provide them with a place to stay overnight. Many banana companies have stopped supporting the bateys, making life extremely difficult for those who live there – fruit pickers have been left without the means to support their families, and the economy suffers.

While I witnessed impoverished living conditions in all of the bateys, the Haitian batey was the most disadvantaged by far. We arrived at 7:00am to the abandoned banana packing plant and quickly transformed the area into a clinic. 30-40 patients were already lined up. Many of them had walked miles. Some of them had no shoes. Others were carrying one child on their back and another in their arms. I quickly gobbled down my granola bar while huddled over; in hindsight, I should have eaten it on the bus beforehand, away from the patients, considering many of them don’t have such easily accessible food.

As a pre-dental student, I had been assigned to spend the morning helping the dentist and her assistant. What struck me most were the Haitian children’s reactions to seeing the dentist, or lack thereof. In the U.S., it is not unexpected for a child to tantrum when propped up in the dentist’s chair. They clench their teeth closed and turn away from the approaching dentist’s hands. They cry for Mom or Dad whenever it’s deemed safe to open their mouth and howl. In contrast, not once at the pop-up clinic did I see a Haitian child fight the dentist. Not once did I hear them scream at the top of their lungs. Instead, often there without a parent, the child would lie on the chair with his or her mouth wide open, totally vulnerable, and not make a move or a sound. The dentist would scan and scrub and scrape, and then the child would sit up, lean over the side, and spit a mouth full of blood and plaque into a cardboard box filled with dirt. There were no stickers to reward their bravery or high fives from Mom or Dad. The kids were sent off with the only toothbrushes we had (boring adult ones instead of the fun, cartoon-themed ones often handed out in the U.S.), and started the long journey home.

I also experienced the impact a language barrier can have. Communication is perhaps the most important element in building a positive doctor-patient relationship. My day in the Haitian batey where everyone spoke Creole reminded me of this. Not being able to greet, instruct, or comfort these patients made me feel helpless. I still remember a middle-aged woman who let out groans so deep I couldn’t help but furrow my brow as I imagined her pain. “¿Qué le duele? / What hurts?” I asked. It was challenging enough to understand the woman’s response as she gritted her teeth and whimpered in agony, but when she answered in Creole instead of Spanish, I was filled with frustration. The language barrier made it difficult for me to clearly listen to or readily comfort her. Fortunately, we had a team of translators helping us. They translated from Creole to Spanish, and then another group translated from Spanish to English. Nonetheless, there was no way for us students or the non-Creole-speaking American doctors to directly communicate with her. I found this to be extremely limiting in assessing complaints and prescribing medicine.

As a pre-dental student majoring in Spanish, I hope to one day be able to combine my passions in order to communicate and empathize with both English and Spanish-speaking patients. My week in the D.R. affirmed the value of incorporating a Spanish language education into my dental career. Had the groaning woman spoken Spanish, I could have reassured her: “You were right to come here. Everything is going to be ok. We are going to help you.”

My week in the Dominican Republic ignited in me a desire to fight for equal access to healthcare worldwide. I will never forget the struggle of those who live in the bateys. Indeed, they will inspire me as I continue on my journey, and I hope to return one day as a practicing dentist. Until then, I plan to serve in my local community, as great disparities also exist in our own backyard.

Rachel is a junior at Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in Spanish and minoring in medical humanities. She aspires to practice dentistry and cultural humility in a medically under served area.

When a heavy object falls on one’s foot, it exerts pressure on the skin and muscles, and that hurts. Raw sensation is the pressure, and everything beyond that is interpretation. To feel is a combination of raw sensation and interpretation from the brain based on past experiences.

But when one loses the ability to recall, one loses the ability to interpret and sometimes even the ability to feel.

My grandmother’s gradual decline all started over a decade ago, in the Malagasy province of Morondava, in Madagascar. My father remembers the day when everything radically pivoted and his world turned upside down: after a strenuous day of housework, my grandmother —for just a moment — confused day and night.

A few years later, the diagnosis was given: Alzheimer’s disease, coupled with brain aging and a strong 25-year-old depression. My grandmother moved to the capital city of Madagascar to become the sixth resident of our household. My parents, sisters and I shaped our lives and schedules according to what we thought my grandmother would feel most comfortable with. She was the beloved center of our lives.

Within several years, all my grandmother could remember clearly was her name. It seemed as if she had entered a parallel universe she had created herself. She got lost in her thoughts while tracing flower patterns with her feet and counting the number of lights out loud. There was no way of telling what she was thinking. I could not bare thinking about how often she felt lost, alone, or misunderstood. The thought haunted me for days; it made me feel utterly helpless.

As her amnesia worsened and her brain activity declined, my grandmother stopped interpreting raw sensation, and, slowly lost her reflexes. She sometimes forgot to drink water after putting a pill in her mouth, and chewed on the medicine instead. The bitter taste surely made its way through the taste buds on the back of her tongue, and was probably sent to her central nervous system, but somehow was not interpreted. Not a single cringe showed on her face.

One may say that her inability to interpret sensation caused her to stop feeling. Indeed, not once did my grandmother show signs of anger, sadness, or even slight feelings of impatience. But she often laughed. Each time she disappeared into her parallel world, I witnessed genuine happiness.

Some people believe that acts of kindness and empathy do not make a difference in a world in which man has already reached the moon. But I believe that it is the little steps we make that end up being the most precious ones. Offering to share her popcorn while watching cartoons on TV made my grandmother happy. When I simply asked about her day, or commented on the flowers that grew in the garden, a smile appeared on her face.

As I grew older, I understood the importance of empathizing with my grandmother. And how could I possibly attempt to do so without her collaboration? I could not change the way she perceived her world, but I could change the way I perceived her world: it all had to do with acceptance.

Empathy, I feel, is the ultimate solution to alleviate one’s pain and help someone make peace with their condition. Within empathy lies acceptance. Coming to terms with a condition is the first step towards wellness. My grandmother was not part of the world I knew so well — this was a fact I could not argue against. There was no use in me trying to include her in the present by constantly reminding her of the time of day or the year, trying to bring her back into my reality only confused her.

In the last years before my grandmother passed away, my family and I ceased trying to heal her by forcing her to remember. We let her imagination go free, and even took part in her adventures. Her imagination, stimulated by compassion and attention, helped her recall certain pleasures of places, smells, sights, tastes, and faces from her past. This seemed to allow her to reconnect with small part of her old self, and make her feel more comfortable in her daily life. I am eternally grateful for all I learned from my grandmother. Her story taught me the immense powers of compassion.

Heena Nissaraly is a sophomore at Boston College majoring in Nursing and minoring in Medical Humanities. She aims to become an empathic nurse specialized in anesthesia or hospice care, and hopes to eventually improve healthcare in Madagascar.

My younger brother, Simon, will always be my best friend. He was born with a mitochondrial disease and was never able to speak or walk, yet he exuded kindness through his unique and loving personality. Simon's gratitude radiated during each of his days, no matter how tough. He often needed nebulizer treatments and suctioning to aid his breathing, but he flashed us huge grins despite the discomfort of the mask and tube, as if we were all in on the same joke. He truly loved and appreciated the things that many of us take for granted, like taking long naps, getting off the bus after a day spent at his special education school, going to music class, and spending a sunny afternoon sitting outside. He especially loved spending his birthday with family, friends, and colorful balloons tied to his wheelchair. I will always remember the huge smile he had whenever he caught a glimpse of the Perry the Platypus balloon I gave him for his twelfth birthday, which somehow remained inflated for months.

Several months after his twelfth birthday, Simon’s respiratory problems became severe. We learned that he likely had less than six months to live. This news was difficult for me to handle as a sixteen-year-old, but my parents and friends offered immense support. My best friend often escorted me out of the classroom when I needed to cry, and my mom frequently picked me up early from school and took me to our favorite coffee shop. In November, Simon began a hospice program and continued to enjoy each day through massage therapy, music, his teachers and caregivers, and our family.

On March 26th, less than three weeks after Simon’s thirteenth birthday, I received the call from my parents that I had been dreading. They told me that they raced home after an urgent call from his caregiver. He was having more trouble breathing than they had ever seen, and they weren't sure how much time we had left with him. Since he had survived many rough days in the past, I clung to the hope that when I got home he would still be smiling at his orange thirteenth birthday balloons.

My mom stopped me at the door on my way inside the house. She told me Simon had passed away a few minutes prior. My vision blurred and I dropped my backpack. I ran into my parents’ room where Simon lay, still believing that he would be okay. Once I physically reached his body and could no longer hope for another day with him, it felt like my whole life shattered. I hugged him, crying, and wondered how we would continue on without our favorite ray of sunshine.

While losing Simon was unbelievably traumatic and devastating, it motivated me to spend time with other children and adults with special needs. Two summers after Simon’s passing, I worked as an assistant teacher at his special education school and as a respite caregiver for people of all ages with disabilities. I am grateful to have had the ongoing opportunity to work with individuals with exceptional needs and to teach and learn from them. My experiences with Simon and other members of the special needs community with whom I connected have inspired me to work toward a career in medicine. I plan to dedicate my life to offering care and love to children with disabilities.

Isabel is a junior at Vanderbilt University majoring in Medicine, Health, and Society. She grew up in Michigan but currently lives in Boise, Idaho with her Great Dane, Arthur.

Putting the pieces of pain together can’t be done by just asking, “Where does it hurt?”

I have always been somewhat accident-prone. Each time I tripped and fell as a child brought the same routine. I would sit on the edge of the tub in my parents’ bathroom with a bleeding knee and a tear-streaked face as my mom or dad got out the Band-Aids, Neosporin, and the despised hydrogen peroxide (it stung too much when it fizzed). I would point to the scrape and roll up my sleeve to reveal any other “boo-boos.” I would leave their bathroom with my lacerations clean, my face dry of tears, and feeling okay, albeit a little achy.

Nearly fifteen later, as a sophomore in college, I shadowed Dr. X every Wednesday afternoon for the practicum component of a semester-long course on Medical Professionalism. In Dr. X’s office, many patients would come in with a laundry list of pain, soreness, discomfort, and hurt. The question “Where does it hurt?” seemed insufficient to understanding their pain fully. The patient may have struggled to push back on Dr. X’s hand with their face. They sometimes found it difficult to answer inquiries such as, “When did the pain start?” or, “Is it radiating?” All of these are pieces of the understanding required to provide adequate and appropriate treatment. Doing so demands the asking the patient multiple pointed questions while also testing them physically. This understanding appeared to be elusive and difficult to acquire for three main reasons: time, creativity, and trust.

Time

During my Wednesdays with Dr. X, I often noticed a tension between the care patients want and the realities of care in our current healthcare system. Patients would often try to show her pictures of their grandchildren or a recent vacation. Sometimes, they, an aging parent, wanted her to explain over the phone what was wrong with them to a concerned child who could not make the appointment. She always obliged as best she could but the system in which she provided care made it difficult. Dr. X was known in her practice for seeing roughly half as many patients as her fellow physicians. She often mentioned to me how difficult it was to accommodate these seemingly irrelevant components of a patient visit when they were often what made the patient most comfortable and most inclined to tell their story.

The doctor’s visit with the patient can only last so long, for other patients need care too, and there are only so many hours in the day. Thus, even when the “right” questions are being asked, patients may not have the opportunity to fully translate their feelings, aches, and pains into words with context (a mosaic of experiences, emotions, environment, and everything in between). As a result, it is challenging to gain a strong understanding of what they are experiencing and subsequently make a suggestion about how to treat their condition(s).

Creativity

I often noted Dr. X’s inventiveness on our Wednesdays together, inspired by her ability to ask questions that led her closer to a diagnostic truth regarding the patient’s experiences. Sometimes people are insecure about their diets, how much they exercise, how often they take a prescribed medicine, and other areas of their lives in which they are not perfectly compliant with doctors’ orders. Thus, we are less likely to offer responses to a provider’s question that allow them to help us, for we are trying to protect ourselves without even realizing it.

This reminds me of visits to the dentist. When the hygienist asks if I’ve been flossing as she scrapes and polishes my teeth, I know that I have to be honest because she has the proof right in front of her. But we all often lie, feeling sheepish for not doing what was asked of us.

Sometimes a matter-of-fact question like, “Do you go to the gym regularly?” is sufficient for a useful answer that guides the doctor to a diagnosis. However, sometimes it seems more appropriate and productive to ask, “What is your daily schedule?” This gives the patient a chance to tell the doctor what they want, be it that the entirety of their exercise regimen consists of walking to work, or that they stop at Chick-fil-A on their way home for dinner. Although this question may not have appeared at the start to have a direct correlation with healthy eating/regular exercise, it may make the patient more comfortable and allow for a more organic conversation. When Doctor X asks more flexible and open questions, this allows for more creative and varied responses that are generally more constructive toward devising a care plan.

Trust

Meeting a patient where they are in a non-judging, kind, and sensible manner, they are much more likely to open up and let the provider know what hurts and how they feel. I trusted my parents to clean my wounds after a fall off my bike and bandage me all up, pointing them to the areas in need of a little love. Similarly, I observed Dr. X’s patients explain pain “at a level eight” that keeps them up at night with a trust that she will take their words and turn them into a diagnosis and treatment that gives them relief.

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Although all patients are different, everyone expects individualized care from their doctor and are usually hoping to be healed. Time, creativity, and trust are crucial pillars that support how the provider meets their patient’s needs by putting their symptomatic puzzle together into a diagnosis.

When I was a little girl, I expected my parents to take my skinned knee and clean it up so that I was good as new. With Dr. X’s patients, their complicated aches and pains require more than just a Band-Aid, but she does have the power to offer them solace. I hope one day to be able to provide antidotes for my patients’ pain, and will strive to ask questions that allow me to do so.

Hannah Todd is a rising senior at Rice University, where she is majoring in Spanish and Policy Studies with a minor in Medical Humanities. Additionally, she is concurrently pursuing her Master's in Public Health at the University of Texas and ultimately plans to attend medical school, which would allow her to integrate personal, academic, and professional experience into care for and policy regarding children with medical complexity.

It was a humid night in June,
One of the hottest days of the year.

You could feel your hair standing up on its end,
As a cold and warm front collided.

It left passers-by wondering if the lightning would ever stop.

It did.

So people believed that the storm was over,
That all was well.

I was too loose.

A group of us were going to Fenway,
First game of the summer,
First beer of the week.

The change in weather felt like a good omen,
We bantered as we walked up to Yawkey,
Taking in the smells of Franks,
The shouts of vendors,
And the sight of RED.

As we moved past security,
And scalpers that hounded,
We made our way to our seats.

Suddenly,
To the right of me,
I heard a sickening sound.

Like the thump of a bird as it hits a window,
Or the crack of a gun as it soars through the air,
Or the split of a head as it meets concrete.

A man lay,
Cane sprawled in front,
Unmoving.

RED blood started pooling,
Pouring out of both ears,
Like my beer pouring out of its tap.

People were screaming,
But I couldn’t hear.

I kept thinking,
He is right next to me,
DO SOMETHING.

I thought back to the CPR training I had taken two summers before,
Was this it?
Is this what I was supposed to do?
Is this the final test?

I got confused and spun in a circle,
Walking around next to him,
Hoping that suddenly I would know his diagnosis,
As the loops straightened out in my head.

Looking,
Gaging,
Watching,
But not acting.

THANK GOD.

Someone else nudged him
Someone else was on a phone,
Someone else said help is on the way.

THANK GOD SOMEONE ELSE IS HERE.

My friends call me over,
Terrified,
But they know they are ok.

They don’t know him,
He’s not their dad,
Uncle,
Or brother,
But I know him.

He was standing right next to ME.

Just that morning,
I was telling someone about my degree.

What do you study?
Medical Humanities.
What does that mean?
EMPATHY.
HELP.
CARE.
LOVE.
SUPPORT.
Oh ok. I get it. We need more people like that.
I AGREE.  We need more people like that.

NOT
Running away,
Waiting for someone else to step in,
A FRAUD.
A PHONY.
A DISGRACE.

As the stretcher wheeled itself,
And four EMTs rushed after it,
I considered chasing after them,
I felt sick.

I’m sorry man!
I didn’t know what to do.
I’m sorry man!
I panicked.
I’m sorry man!
I’ve never seen blood pouring out of a brain.
I’m sorry man!
I haven’t signed up for this.

But I didn’t.

Maybe I’m not EMPATHETIC.
Maybe I’m not destined to:
HELP.
CARE.
LOVE.
SUPPORT.
Maybe we need more people like that.
I AGREE. We need more people like that

Sarah Ramsey is an incoming senior at Boston College with a major in Operations Management and a minor in Medical Humanities.  She is the Managing Editor of the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College and a trip leader for the Appalachia Volunteers.  Sarah aspires to use her business background to improve and expand health opportunities.

The day I learned that I needed hip surgery, I cried tears of relief.

On September 23, 2013, I was playing in a JV field hockey game when all of a sudden, after passing the ball to a teammate, I felt something go wrong.  It was… a pop?… a snap?… a tear?… and it came from somewhere in my left backside.  I could not identify precisely where—in my lower back, upper hip, or glute—I felt it.  As I crawled off the field, I struggled to assemble an explanation to provide the athletic trainer.  To this day, I cannot say exactly where it was or what it felt like, but I do know, as the past three and a half years have proven, that something was not right.

For the first eleven months after my injury I was diagnosed with a torn muscle in my hip, but physical therapy did little to relieve my pain.  I began to see an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hips, who saw nothing notable on my MRIs and encouraged me to continue treating with physical therapy.  After months and months of hard work without relief from the pain, I started to worry that I was somehow doing it wrong.  Finally, a new MRI of my hip, this time done with contrast dye, showed torn cartilage in the joint.  This would require surgery to repair.  When, after a year of persistent and unidentifiable pain, as well as numerous consultations with hip specialists, a surgeon walked into my examination room and claimed that he knew exactly how to cure my pain, I sat on the table in front of him and sobbed.  The recovery would be long and painful, but at least it would mean I was healing.  At this point I would have done anything.

After my surgery, I completed nine months of physical therapy to rehabilitate my hip and the rest of my body.  But as the physical therapy came to an end, I noticed that something still felt off.  I occasionally had that same original pain; it was a pain distinctly different from the normal soreness of post-operative recovery, and I was all too familiar with how it felt.  Worried that the operation had failed, I tried to ignore my discomfort for a year and a half.  I was terrified that if the surgery had not provided a cure, then nothing could.  This past December, after the pain suddenly grew much worse, I finally decided that I could no longer ignore my fears.  I scheduled a follow-up appointment with my hip surgeon, who referred me to a spine center to look for other possible causes for my pain.  To this day, my doctors and I are still searching for its source.

My pain taunts me.  It comes and goes.  It moves from place to place.  It floats, it hovers, over my mind and body, cruelly defying articulation.  The English language offers a myriad of terms to describe pain: sharp, dull, burning, throbbing, sore, stiff, tender… the list goes on.  And yet, my three-and-a-half-year search for the words to most accurately capture my experience has left me with the following clumsy explanation: most of the time it does not feel quite like a throb, but more like a series of discrete pinching and tugging sensations with each movement of my lower body, located somewhere between my sacroiliac joint and L5 disc; other times—when I sit or stand for too long—it aches across most of my lower back.  Sometimes, though, the pain deviates from both of these descriptions.

Without looking at a calendar or an MRI report, I can list off the top of my head everything I have done in the past three and a half years to try to relieve this pain—five MRIs, a CT scan, countless X-rays, six specialists, two chiropractors, two injections, and one unsuccessful surgery—including the dates on which most of them took place.  But, despite my three and a half years of familiarity with this injury, I cannot explain how it physically feels.

Three years ago, I spent my time training for the sport I loved, pushing through the pain of conditioning and doing everything I could to prevent the pain of injury.  Now, I spend my time catering to physical pain, altering my movements and avoiding certain motions altogether.  I prepare for each doctor’s appointment by obsessively practicing my story—the words I’ve carefully picked to best convey how the pain feels—in my head.  I brace myself for the disappointment of watching yet another medical professional fumble for a diagnosis.  And I desperately hope for the opposite: I hope that one of these appointments will lead to definitive answers.  I hope to one day again cry tears of relief like those I cried the day I believed in the miraculous powers of hip surgery.

This piece was originally published in The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2017.

Evelyn Caty is currently a sophomore at Boston College majoring in Biology and planning to minor in Medical Humanities.  She works as an EMT for Boston College Emergency Medical Services, and hopes to pursue a career in health care in the future.

This week in shadowing, we saw a coronary artery bypass. Because we shadow anesthesiology, we get to see the doctors and nurses set up. It is like setting up a show, everything must be done a certain way in a certain order. From inserting the catheter to carefully draping him so only the necessary areas of his body were exposed (in his case, his entire torso and his legs) and even unwrapping the towels a certain way, everything must be done just so and this was all before he was even cut open. A nurse got us step stools to stand on so we could see. The surgeons walked in at the last minute, taking the drill and the blade and adjusting the lights above. Then, they got to work and we stood there mesmerized until we had to go back to class.

On the walk back to campus, I was in a daze. Upon reflecting on the experience, I found it to be simply bizarre to consider how the show and many others like it are continuing in operating rooms all over the world while we walk outside in the light of day. I couldn't stop thinking about the aftermath of the show. When I was in fourth grade, I was the wicked witch of the west for my class’ version of the Wizard of the Oz and the face paint dyed my face green for three days after. The show was over but I felt like it was still happening to me.

The man who underwent surgery today is going to wake up and hurt. But the surgeons had to break him to fix him. It was simply another day of work for these doctors. The anesthesiologists likely won’t see the patient again, but the surgeons, the ones who weren’t even there from start to finish, will be the ones to see him again when he wakes up. He will go home eventually and have a long, difficult recovery from this invasive surgery.

I admired the patient’s bravery and the surgeons’ dexterity. I was amazed at the anesthesiologists’ ability to compute complex body statistics against powerful medications. If I walked out in a daze and the man under the knife walks out in pain, how do the doctors walk out? Do they hurt, too, when they imagine what it feels like later to have the many sutures down your chest? Do they smile when they think about the years of life they added to his by just doing their job? In the operating room, they are all one show: surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, perfusionists, and even us undergraduate students. Outside, we are a fragmented entity that carries only our unique perspective of the show, combined with some input from their explanations.

As a doctor, I will need to learn how to make sense of the show every day. To care for children with medical complexity, children whose needs do not fit inside a single diagnosis or a single medication, I will need to work in teams to put on good shows. But at the end of the day, when I will go home hopefully to my family, I wonder where I will put it. I am an empathic, emotional, and sensitive human being, but I am also driven and dedicated. I believe that I will learn how to integrate what I see of and the role I play in the show into who I am, without losing myself in the process.

Hannah Todd is a rising senior at Rice University, where she is majoring in Spanish and Policy Studies with a minor in Medical Humanities. Additionally, she is concurrently pursuing her Master's in Public Health at the University of Texas and ultimately plans to attend medical school, which would allow her to integrate personal, academic, and professional experience into care for and policy regarding children with medical complexity.

A tumor.

The first time I noticed “It,” I was looking at my reflection in a dingy bathroom.

“Hello,” It introduced itself, “I’m new, but I’ll be here awhile.” It was a lump on my neck, found only because it cast a shadow.

“Do you have a name?” I asked, hoping in vain that this time It would answer. Silence, as always, would follow. Just the steadiness of my heartbeat, pulsing blood through my veins—through It, feeding It, helping It grow. Out of my control, yet within me.

I bargained with that silence as if it would have made a difference. “If you go away, I’ll go to the gym more. I’ll eat fewer desserts.”

Still silence.

“I’ll work harder in school. Go to the gym EVERY day. Eat no dessert.”

Still silence.

But the bargain felt complete, and the silence less threatening, and Its presence retreated back into the corners of my brain. I carried on, hating the body that put me in this position. Feeling helpless to do anything, yet determined to do something—if I couldn’t control It, I’d control everything else.

This cycle repeated for months. Until the first time It broke the silence.

“My name is Danger,” It said, “and you should fear me.”

“What kind of Danger?” I asked. But my translator, the doctor, didn’t know. It wasn’t speaking clearly yet. The doctor needed to make a personal visit. Needed to cut It open and confront It. Surgery.

So It had a name. A vague name: Danger.

But I was no closer to knowing what kind of Danger. An urgent one? A false one? “It’s most likely nothing,” the doctor said. The visit would be a formality, just to confirm this.

The Danger’s silence was deafening. I went back to bargaining, desperate for more control; more information. My bargaining had me eating too little, working too hard, and stressed out about how to act ‘normal.’

I looked like I had it all together, people later told me. Wrong: I was a sad and anxious human.

In the midst of these bargains, I learned about cultivating a gratitude practice while scouring health blogs for diet tips. Be grateful, and happiness will follow, the experts said. I wanted to be happy.

So I would wake up 5 minutes earlier and list what I was grateful for. My family, my friends…the usual. Then 5 minutes became 10, and I listed more things: the opportunities to attend college, and to live near the best hospitals in the world.

One morning, there was something new on the list. I hadn’t planned it. It just slipped out unexpectedly:

“I’m grateful for my body.”

What?!

My body, inhabited by Danger, my elusive enemy? My body, the home of that tumor? No, that can’t be right, I told myself.

But then I thought about it. My body lets me run and jump and sing and laugh and love. My body was fighting back against Danger and all his pervasive silence.

Okay…maybe I could be grateful for my body.

It became my mantra. Even on days when I didn’t believe it, I expressed gratitude for my body. In the beginning, that was most days. But I had believed once, so I knew I could believe again.

The next time Danger broke his silence, it wasn’t good news. The visit that my doctor paid didn’t confirm It was “nothing.”

 “I’m sorry, but it was cancerous.”

So that’s your real name. Not “It.” Not “Danger.” Cancer.

But the name, Cancer, was liberating. While fog had once obscured the path to health, now I had a flashlight, and a map. Now I knew my enemy. How to fight him. How to beat him.

I think that I’d known all along that It was really Cancer. It hadn’t felt like a friendly tumor when I first found it. It felt wrong, full of dark energy. Panic and anxiety greeted me whenever I examined It in the mirror.

But now that it’s all over, pride greets me when I look in the mirror. My scar is a daily reminder that two surgeries and radiation sent Cancer packing. My body fought back. She wouldn’t let the worst happen because she was strong and full of love. Now, when I run or jump or sing or laugh or love, it’s a victory lap.

Cancer wanted to rob me of fully embracing life, but I didn’t let it. There wasn’t one specific moment when I realized that I had really started living; there were lots of small moments that added up:

Like on the day I was three months clean, and my friends surprised me with an enormous card telling me how proud they were and how much they loved me. That was the day I realized that I didn’t fight cancer alone for a single moment.

Or when I was eight months clean, when I walked out of class at the Sorbonne and realized I was living out a childhood dream, to study in Paris. That was the day I realized that I should continue to dream, because those dreams could come true.

Or when I was sixteen months clean, and the leader for a retreat I had agreed to help with kept poking just a little bit more than anyone else had at my feelings about cancer, and I admitted out loud for the first time that I had been scared. That I had pretended I wasn’t so no one would worry about me. That was the day I realized the importance of being truly vulnerable and honest with myself about my feelings.

Really living means being aggressively friendly to friends new and old. It means saying yes to pizza AND fries, because life is too short to choose. It means running faster, jumping higher, singing louder, laughing longer, and loving deeper.

Really living means I don’t bargain with the silence. I fill it with life.

Kitty Sargent is a recent graduate of Boston College, where she studied Political Science and French, and served on the executive board of Real Food BC, a food sustainability group.

I sit down in the chair opposite yours. It’s a lovely day outside: Spring peeks her head out along the esplanade, the sun warms our space beside your bed.

 You don’t know me. I am a stranger to you, but you let me stay anyway.

Our conversation starts slowly: small talk about the weather, hospital food. Then we shift; the gradual dance of vulnerability between strangers begins. You take a breath, and begin letting me into your life. I listen and learn. About your frustrations. About how long you have been here, in this hospital, beneath the fluorescent lights. About the lack of answers, the constant struggle for control. I nod and murmur.

Now you talk about your family. About feeling like a burden to them, being here, sick, dying. Now you talk about depression, the loneliness of death, how narrow the tunnel becomes when you’re heading towards its end. You talk now as a human being struggling to hold onto your humanity.

Gingerly, I reach across the sun-lit space. I hold your hand, but I say nothing. What is there to say in the face of human suffering? Where words fail, touch and silence speak.

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For the past two years I have been blessed to work as a palliative care volunteer in a hospital. My job is simple: to provide company to patients who are chronically ill or dying. Really, I just serve as a companion – to sit with, to talk to, to watch TV beside, to listen to music with. In this role, doing these simple things, I have received one of the greatest gifts of my life: through others’ stories of suffering and joy, I know the beauty of a shared humanity.

 If healthcare is defined as curing or fixing, then I am essentially helpless as a volunteer – I have no skills, knowledge, or experience that can cure or fix these people. However, I have come to learn through time spent with my patients that sometimes it is not knowledge, tools, or skills that are required for healing. Rather, healing can be wrought by each of us simply as we are, as people. Sometimes all we need to provide a moment of healing for one another lies in the ways in which we are able to hold, sit, and simply be in each other’s company.

From my patients, I’ve learned something both humbling and empowering: in a world where we are constantly trying to fix, sometimes it’s okay to just sit together and be broken in our own separate ways. It is through the cracks within us that the healing enters.

Claire Stauffer is a recent graduate of Boston College, where she majored in Biology and English. She serves as an EMT-B and palliative care volunteer in the Boston area. Her first narrative piece “Weight” was featured in the Boston College Medical Humanities Journal and on the HSC College Voices blog.

“Do I look man enough?”

As someone whose body falls outside the societal ideal, I have struggled to establish a positive body image. Skinny, lithe, and lean, my body might fit the mold of a long-distance runner, but one would hardly consider it stereotypically masculine. One might even say it’s feminine. And if there’s one thing men are taught to reject, it is femininity.

I have spent years painstakingly overanalyzing nutrition and exercise and appearance, trying to decipher whether my body was a body I wanted, a body I felt proud of. I’ve tried to balance my daily miles with my daily calorie intake, a strong lower body with a comparatively weaker upper body. My exercise accomplishments —hikes, long runs, marathons, personal records—can sometimes feel less valuable when I consider my frame.

While trying to make sense of my body, I’ve grappled with the rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity: what constitutes a “good” body versus a “bad” body? The construction of these illusive categories show deep-rooted problems in the way society understands health, gender, and individual expression.

In the United States, the ideal male body is muscular, athletic, formidable, and toned. I don’t have bulging or sculpted muscles. I’m not tall or broad-shouldered. And for so long I focused on how my body failed to meet standards instead of defining my own terms for body satisfaction.

My time at college is marked by small steps forward in my journey towards establishing healthy body image. It has involved coming to terms with the ways in which my body does not meet the dominant standards of masculinity. This progress is largely due to students and faculty initiating conversations and posing important questions about body image and campus culture at Boston College and other campuses across the country.

While exploring my body image, I have grappled with questions like:

“Do I look man enough?”

“Do I look masculine?”

“Do I have a good body?”

“What is a good body anyway?”

What I’ve come to value—and what has helped so much—is having space to explore these questions with others, whether in class, at a lecture, or in a friend’s living room. So many people are exploring these questions!

June was Men’s Health Month, and advocates across the country created space for discussing issues like preventive health and mental health. After long being solely cast as women’s health issues, body image and body satisfaction have become increasingly vital topics

in men’s health as well. For instance, during Love Your Body Week at Boston College, there is always an event that addresses issues of masculinity and body image.

This chiseled ideal of masculinity narrows the range of male bodies deemed acceptable, attractive, or desirable and casts an impossible mold for men and boys. If you deviate too far from that standard, you might just feel out of place. For example, restricting the ideal body to an impossible healthy and muscular standard has produced an unhealthy culture of workout supplements and bodybuilding. The body is often a source of concern and dissatisfaction, and this kind of scrutiny can have debilitating consequences for mental and physical health, as in Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder.

Stories about body image are necessary because they reveal the cracks in the impossible model of embodied masculinity. Even starting these conversations can be difficult because stereotypical masculinity dictates that we show unwavering confidence in the face of adversity, that we hide vulnerability. Instead of engaging honestly and critically, we keep quiet.

Against the odds, while in college, I began to embrace my own body and celebrate the remarkable and beautiful diversity of all bodies. At college, we’re encouraged to examine the way our bodies affect our relationships with friends, classmates, partners, mentors, and professional connections. What’s less talked about is how this obsession with idealized bodies affects our relationships with ourselves.

Taking part in the campus conversations about body image and learning to celebrate difference provided the momentum I needed to move forward.

I had many difficult days and experiences, like runs not intended to celebrate my body but to punish it, restrictive eating habits, and experimenting with protein supplements. But I’ve come to focus less on how my body looks, and more on what it can do. I might have a slight frame, but my accomplishments are sizeable. I’ve raced two marathons and run countless miles. I’ve hiked difficult trails, culminating in the most spectacular views. I’ve become an adventurous eater, and I’ve embraced food as nourishment and cooking as an opportunity for building connections with friends and family.

Taking a holistic approach to body image—realizing that I am more than my body as much as I am my body—has helped me recognize the value and worth of my own frame. Instead of focusing on the stereotypically masculine features I don’t have, I focus on what I do have: an agile body that supports my everyday activities, an efficient and powerful stride that powers my long distance running.

I’m only one man, but this body is man enough for me.

Christopher Kabacinski is a recent graduate of Boston College, where he studied English and medical humanities, co-founded the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, and led the public speaking and storytelling group Word of Mouth. Originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chris now lives in Boston and works in global public health.

Born with a benign tumor (or “hemangioma”) on my left cheek, I attracted a great amount of uncomfortable attention. This attention influenced the way in which I saw myself. I often felt that my blemish prevented me from being what society considered “beautiful.”

As a girl entering her teenage years, I could not help but worry about the ways I would be viewed by others, especially by boys. When I expressed these concerns to my mom, she offered a potential solution that would require no words – a stern stare back would do the trick. I would simply be giving others a taste of their own medicine. While my voice was hushed in hopes of diverting attention away, it quickly became apparent that even this solution would not work. My work illustrates this struggle and my resulting frustration as I felt that I had no control over how people looked at me. On the contrary, it began to feel like others had more control than I did over how I perceived myself.

My comic was inspired by Miriam Engelberg’s graphic narrative, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, in hopes of showing rather than telling my experience with staring. My piece ends with my unsatisfied self confronting the reality of living with an abnormal mark on my face. It is difficult to change the way society views people who possess different characteristics. Such a societal approach has the power to negatively impact the illness experience of many individuals living with various disabilities, disorders, and diseases. As I matured throughout my experiences, however, I came to learn that a greater triumph can result in the way I react – by not letting the stares of others reflect onto the person I saw in the mirror. With this perspective I became a more confident individual who appreciates the differences that other people possess.

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Karolina Mieczkowska is a senior at Boston College majoring in Biochemistry and minoring in Medical Humanities. She plans on pursuing a career in medicine as a physician.

When I was five, I wouldn’t let a single person near my hair. My mother had to go out and buy me an expensive bristle brush designed for sensitive scalps. She gave me a peek at it in the car as we drove home. “It’s a magic brush,” she told me. “A magitch brush,” my dad would correct with a wink.

 Still, hair-brushing time always filled me with dread. In a sudden burst of toddler witticism, I compared the process to airplanes flying into the back of my head. My mother and my nanny Marcy had to get creative. In a particularly successful method, I would wrap my arms around the hairbrusher in question and holler into her shirt as she teased out the snarls. In another approach, I would flip my head upside down and stand with the blood rushing to the tips of my ears as my tangles were torn apart. My dad lacked the courage to even try. On the mornings he was in charge of my hair, he spent half an hour gingerly skimming the brush somewhere over my head, leaving a knot hidden at the nape of my neck.

 My mother lost her hair twice. Every morning, she would wake up to another nest on her pillow, her hope to be spared shattered like broken eggshells. I was too young to grasp the gravity of this grief. I wrote her a poem as a peace offering, and then cut off my own hair to my shoulders three times. And while she fretted over her scarves, I admired them. She picked the most beautiful colors: blue with white-lined diamonds, swirls of autumn painted with the browns and reds of dying leaves, lilac stained with deep purples.

 When her hair grew back the first time, it arrived in curls. My mother taught herself to tame it with her hair dryer and various brushes, the scariest of which I dubbed the Red Brush. On weekday mornings in the winter, I would wake up to a pitch black sky and the distant croak of crows. I’d burrow under my blankets, listening to the sound of running water from down the hall. The house was dark but for the soft light from the bathroom, and it was a comfort knowing someone else was up, that she would soon raise the heat, flick on the lights, and sing me awake. It was a comfort knowing that my mother was standing in front of the steamy mirror, wrapped in a towel and curling her bangs, playing with her hair until cancer skulked away, defeated.

 I taught myself to braid after she died. She had showed me the basics – three pieces, weave under, over, under again – but I had never mastered it on my own. Even ponytails were beyond my ability. I spent ages in front of the mirror each morning, screaming in frustration. I worked at it until my scalp groaned in pain. Caring about the inconsequential was my means of survival. But now when I pull at my hair, I don’t worry about it being perfect. Instead, I remember the way my mother twirled her finger around the wisps of my hair when she told me that she loved the way they curled.

 On those mornings when we were running late and my hair was in no state to make its daily appearance, my mother would wash it in the kitchen sink. She’d rest a towel behind my neck and tell me to lean back, the tips of my hair dangling near the drain. I can still feel her fingers on my head as they traced rhythmic circles from one side to the other. I can still hear the squeak of air as she squeezed the shampoo bottle and made fireworks of soap bubbles float around us.

Anna McLoud Gibbs is a freshman at Harvard College. She has not yet declared a major. She is from Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Your scabs are elegant because they are outward signs of you mending and regenerating, creating soft new skin without even thinking about it. While you’re busy being angry about your inability to finish a task for work or dreading calling  someone back, while you’re regretting the choice you made last month, without even knowing it, you’re subconsciously reconstructing yourself, and your ‘big’ worries are trivialities compared to your body’s own constant maintenance of what is vital, what keeps you alive.

I’m not going to tell you to find someone to hold your hand even when it’s callused or scabbed. You’ve already been told that, and that doesn’t mean it always goes well, or will provide what you need. Instead, I’m going to tell you to learn to respect your own scabs, to find elegance and utility in the way your calluses grip your coffee mug. To not think twice before wearing shorts when there are chain grease stripes, scabs and bruises on your legs.

It’s far too easy to fear someone else’s split-second judgment about your scars or calluses or the shape of your muscles. But, while someone else may shake your hand for five seconds, you wear and carry it always. You are the one who watches your

fingers nimbly hop the keys of your keyboard as you type, lift the spoon in your breakfast each morning, and gently comb out your hair each night. As you work to modify yourself with your mind, recall that your body is doing the same, and respect it. Respect your scabs.

Annie Harvieux is a senior at Harvard College, where she is an English major.

It was quiet that afternoon. Weekday afternoons were always quiet in our house. Dreamy, lazy, languid in the heat of summer, resting on the downstairs couch I heard you calling me from upstairs. Your voice had that same timber, will always have that same timber every time you call me upstairs. I rose, hesitant to leave that sunlit couch, but your voice again Claire, come up just a moment! there again beckoned me up, up into that bathroom. I entered the room and met eyes with you and you said I just need your help for a moment in that hushed way, in that way that made me know it was ME who needed to help you, and it couldn’t be Jill. That hushed language between parents and older siblings is one you learn from the moment that second child is born. Out on the smooth counter-top sat Dad’s old electric razor. I lifted it, felt it weigh in my hands. I knew what was coming, God we all knew it was coming. It had been coming since April, since that hushed conversation, that same hushed language in the car on a same sunny afternoon, that same don’t tell Jill had weighed the same as this razor weighed now. You sat in that chair and stared back at me from the mirror, but your eyes weren’t meeting mine, not really, and mine weren’t meeting yours, not really.

You looked like a child then, like I did when I was five and waiting for Dad to comb my hair, and you looked up at me, your child, in that same way. Waiting for me to comb your hair. The razor felt heavier now, the weight of that hush felt heavier now, everything was heavier now the moment you looked up at me like that.

I turned the razor on.

It became real then.

I fumbled my way through the already thinning patches of your scalp. I felt unsure, unready, wielding that razor. Shouldn’t I know how to do this, shouldn’t everyone know from the movies? They do this all the time in movies, this moment right here. But they don’t tell you about how heavy that razor is in movies, they don’t tell you how much steel can weigh when you look at me like that.

You made a joke like you always do - that Irish bleak humor never turns off, not even for a second. I laughed. I appreciated it.

You could tell how hard this was, I could tell how hard this was, but we just kept staring and not seeing, not actually. But we knew, and we kept that secret, you and me, between ourselves and the hushes and that heavy, heavy razor.

I finished and cleared some stray hairs from your crown, and you sat (admiring yourself, I liked to imagine). Seeing yourself, that terrifying feeling of seeing yourself, and while you were seeing yourself so was I. I was seeing you, actually. For the first time, maybe.

You were thinner now, medications already starting to wear on you. But you looked determined. But you looked scared. But you looked at me and I knew you were looking at me as equal now, because I was seeing you for the first time. How is it that after sixteen years I am only now seeing you for the first time?

We’ll be okay you said. That ‘we’. The ‘we’ that meant we were in this together, as partners, as equals, that ‘we’ that made up that hushed language, that ‘we’ that had been weighing down on me since you pulled over that car on that sunny afternoon in April and you told me that you had breast cancer.

Yes, that same ‘we’ that made me know we—you, and me, and Jill—we would all be okay.

Claire Stauffer is a senior at Boston College, where she is double majoring in Biology and English. This piece was originally published in The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, Volume 1, Issue 2, Fall 2015.

What makes up the world, for me, is language. While the natural sciences contend that the world is made of matter—atoms, molecules, cells, genes, tissue, organs—I believe that language accounts for what happens between people. We don’t just pass down genes. We inherit the words we speak. We don’t just care for our own bodies. We care for our own stories.

I arrived at Boston College certain that I would study English and love it, but after a year of introductory English classes, I felt entirely uninspired. What was the matter? When it came to the stories, what mattered?

During sophomore year, something happened in my own story. I stumbled across a news article about a new interdisciplinary Medical Humanities minor. Medical humanities is a field devoted to the humanistic and cultural study of medicine, caregiving, illness, disability, and representations of the body; it values the interconnectedness and complexity of these issues, looking at them from different perspectives in order to better understand them. These topics have always been present in my life: my sister works in a lab, my twin is studying medical imaging, my mother is an EMG technician, my parents cared for aging and ill relatives and friends.

Could medical humanities synthesize my love for literature and my interest in caregiving and healthcare?

Sophomore fall, I attended a symposium at Boston College on Genetics, Narrative, and Identity. Contributors to The Story Within, a collection of essays on genetic diseases and the complex life-stories and decisions surrounding them, captivated me with their candor, strength, and insight. The day culminated in a writing workshop and keynote address given by Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., who founded the field of narrative medicine. She made clear to me what it means to be present for another person, in sickness or in health.

I decided to enroll in an introductory medical humanities course. In the texts we studied and the conversations in which we engaged, the complexity and high stakes of the issues—genetic testing, public health, representing disability and disease—marveled me.

The most compelling text to me was Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. She writes: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” 1 Pain is that which cannot be put into words, cannot be represented; so specific, so individual, it falls outside of any system of communication. At the same time, pain is perhaps the most difficult thing for a listener to believe. If pain really did destroy language, dissolve the relationship between two people, what did this mean for me and my world of words?

But, more importantly, pain calls us to bridge the gap between individuals. Pain calls us to create something, to listen with empathy, to trust, to acknowledge the other, to bear witness. In sickness and in health, in pain and in pleasure, our words and our stories are what humanize us and connect us.

A friend of mine recently shared with me that she has been dealing with diabetes since she was two years old. She is one of the most driven, most involved students I know. I felt so fortunate and honored to hear her story and her insight. Her story and the conversations that followed strengthened our friendship.

In college, the stories of chronic illness or disability are so often untold and unheard. Built environments and institutional policies, sometimes established without consideration for those who have chronic illnesses or disabilities, can intensify these potentially isolating experiences. Laurie Edwards, a writing instructor at Northeastern University and a person with chronic illnesses herself, writes on the state of colleges for students with chronic illnesses or disabilities, shedding light onto the ways in which colleges fail these students.2 Students, faculty, and administrators should acknowledge these students and their individual needs. Making accommodations for these students and respecting their stories for these students will ensure that higher education remains accessible to all people—sick or well, disabled or able-bodied.

On a college campus, it is easy to assume that everyone is healthy, with crowds at the gyms and a vibrant and energetic student population. At the same time, illness is easily normalized. What college student hasn’t been exhausted? Who hasn’t caught a cold in a residence hall? We must heed narrative medicine’s call to honor the stories of health and illness in each individual, to acknowledge its specificity, and to listen with care and empathy. With this kind of attitude, we can perhaps see that the campus of the healthy and the campus of the ill are not different places: they’re the same.

Over the coming months, I will facilitate the sharing of stories about college students living with chronic illnesses or disability. Stay tuned for future features from me on these issues.

Christopher Kabacinski is a rising senior at Boston College, where he is studying English and Medical Humanities. He is a founder and the editor-in-chief of The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College, a student-run journal featuring undergraduate work on issues such as medicine, health, illness, disability, bioethics, and representations of the body. Currently, Chris is working as intern at Health Story Collaborative. He is developing a project about college students with chronic illness or disability. If you or someone you know might be interested in sharing his or her story of health, illness, or disability, please contact Chris at healthstorycollaborative@gmail.com.

Resources:

1. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 1985. Print. 4.

2. Edwards, Laurie. “When It Comes To Chronic Illness, College Campuses Have A Lot To Learn.” WBUR, Cognoscenti: Boston, MA. 5 March 2014. Web. Accessed 16 June 2015.

Sometimes it feels as if the path to becoming a practicing physician is a path of deferral. As a premedical student and sophomore in college, I have seen my peers engage in a variety of activities that are required for medical school but are not directly applicable to life as a physician. My colleagues have reviewed physics for the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test), studied the nuances of organic chemistry, and adopted leadership roles by managing large organizations and events.

As a premedical student myself, I am often tempted to think of life as a physician as the final attainment of a routine that matters. Finally, instead of focusing on how to fulfill particular requirements and prepare for a standardized examination, a physician can find treatments for patients and help make scientific breakthroughs. Instead of being attuned to the competitive nature of an application process, a physician is able to reflect on how to best relate to their patients with care and empathy and how to best work with other members of their health care team.

However, when I ask physicians for advice or insight, they often describe how the practice of medicine is not as ideal as premedical students might project it to be, and has its challenges just as the premedical experience has challenges. For instance, an emphasis on efficiency makes it difficult for physicians and other health care professionals to adequately spend time listening to their patients. The commercialization of the medical field can also make work difficult, and even disillusioning, for physicians.

Understanding these realities provides a new perspective for premedical students: an awareness that the practice of medicine is imperfect. Students should expect to be faced with imperfections, such as timing constraints and a frustrating inability to listen fully to patients, during their later years as a physician. Armed with this knowledge and perspective, premedical students know more about what they can expect, and perhaps even change, in the field of medicine.

They can also face the path to medical school with a fresh perspective. Because I have realized that the practice of medicine, like the premedical experience, contains elements that do not directly relate to becoming a better physician, I am less frustrated by the process. Instead, I am more focused on how to make my premedical experience translate into a learning experience that will help me become a more engaged physician.

More deeply, health care professionals' efforts to fill in the gaps of modern medical practice inspire me and resonate with my idealistic impulse to contribute to the medical field. I hope to be involved with medicine because I hope to help others restore their health, whether they are struggling physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Although a major component of doing this as a physician is of course providing medicine, I am also interested in less traditional ways that health care providers can facilitate emotional healing.

Health Story Collaborative is one such example. By providing a space for patients to share their stories with others, Health Story Collaborative creates a sense of community. Patients who are hesitant or unable to leave their homes to attend a support group can still participate. Moreover, some patients may prefer the opportunity for privacy while bringing up uncomfortable or distressing topics with others. Health Story Collaborative also provides more opportunity than a support group for less spontaneous conversation that can more accurately reflect the nuances of a patient's experience. Patients spend time discussing and crafting their narrative with a physician, and the final written or audio transcript can capture more of their experience than quickly delivered thoughts.

Efforts such as Health Story Collaborative provide patients with emotional comfort, and also broaden the practice of medicine. By facilitating such efforts, physicians can do more for their patients and feel less constrained by the medical field's commercialization and haste. They can more deeply understand the patient experience, and become more empathetic and better prepared to provide advice that is relevant to specific challenges that patients face. This inspires me as a premedical student and indicates that the practice of medicine is more meaningful and more involved than I could have expected.