I was born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland into two clans of dairy farmers and a culture of storytelling. I had so much fun looking under logs with my high school biology teacher that I have been an outdoorswoman ever since.  Inspired by that teacher and our love of beautiful stories that lead to grander questions, I pursued undergraduate studies in both Molecular Biology and English Literature. I went to medical school aspiring to do basic science research but then fell in love with clinical medicine. As a doctor, I have always been drawn to the uniqueness of each patient’s story.

Only recently did I begin to consider my story-listening and storytelling a gift. In 2014, after 21 years of pediatric practice, I started to write down some extraordinary patient stories. I realized they had become my stories, not just “doctor-patient” stories.  Moreover, the stories that are most powerful are all our stories, moving us because they are stories of robust vulnerability and resilience which define our humanity. 

This piece, “Perspective,” was written during a writing exercise at the 2017 Taos Writing and Wellness Conference for medical professionals. In the exercise, we were given 20 minutes to write from the perspective of a patient or a disease. Though I had been writing stories about my experiences with patients, I had never actually tried writing a story from the patient’s perspective. 

A twelve year old girl I had seen in clinic the week before immediately came to mind. I had had a striking realization at that clinic visit. My celebrations with her mother of how far the girl had come and how well she was doing at our clinic visits had actually been having an unintended consequence of making the child herself occasionally wake at night fearful. 

This piece is my exploration of that patient’s perspective, including her perspective of that clinic visit. Without taking time to think about it during this quick exercise, I wrote in a font that felt unlike me—intuitively I selected “chalkboard” to express “her voice”—intellectually quite concrete and emotionally young. 

This girl was born with a form of congenital heart disease in which the heart’s main pumping chamber did not form (Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome).  She had a sudden cardiac arrest following neonatal surgery. She literally was in my hands when her heart stopped, and I did CPR and then internal cardiac massage while our surgeons put her on mechanical circulatory support. From that point on, she has done great and medically she is expected to continue that trajectory for decades. I have been her cardiologist through all of this. She is thriving so well that classmates and neighbors would never know she even has a heart condition.