Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List

Editor’s note: “Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List” is a monthly roundup where we share some of the most compelling health care narratives driving the news and conversation in recent weeks.

An Emergency In Slow Motion

In “Wait Times,” the prize-winning lead essay in Creative Nonfiction’s summer issue, writer Joe Fassler tells the harrowing tale of his wife’s lengthy ordeal in a New York emergency room. For hours, his wife Rachel suffered in excruciating pain, while clinicians dismissed her symptoms as those related to kidney stones, and did not perform the needed exam that would have diagnosed her true condition—ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it weighs the ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube—far earlier. The ovary has been removed, and the acute pain of the experience has faded away, but for Fassler’s wife, the mental scars of “the trauma of not being seen” will remain.

Ending Homelessness

Through the use of long-form writing and cartoons, Susie Cagle, a journalist and editorial cartoonist, describes how the Housing First doctrine has helped the state of Utah decrease homelessness by 91 percent over the past decade. “Homes for the Homeless,” her piece for the digital magazine Aeon, explains how Housing First, in which government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes without any prerequisites, actually save money in the long-run, compared to the costs of shelters, health care, and other forms of triage for the homeless. The model has been slow to spread to other cities and states.

How Doctors Grieve

Western society doesn’t talk much about grief, and doctors are no exception, writes Australian primary care physician Alison Edwards in a post for KevinMD called “6 reasons why doctors grieve differently.”

Conditioned as they are to accept patients’ deaths as a casualty of the job, doctors may become ill prepared to deal with their own personal grief, explains Edwards, whose partner died of a cardiac arrest about a decade ago.

“Knowing death so intimately may falsely lead us to think we are acquainted with grief but when it comes to losing a loved one, all bets are off,” she writes. “The professional veneer is possibly an impediment to leaning into the experience of grief.”

Edwards is interested in collecting the input and stories from other doctors or health professionals on the topic of grief.

“I do think the more stories available, the more chance of finding one that rings true for another grieving colleague,” she writes.

Female Pain

Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain and fatigue condition diagnosed in women seven times more than in men, is the disease that many women have been told is “all in their heads.” In “Female Pain: Living with an Illness That No One Believes In,” vice staff writer Gabby Bess reviews Tender Points, a new book by Amy Berkowitz about “what it’s like to live with the chronic pain that characterizes the disease, and what it’s like when no one believes you’re hurting.” Bess also details the medical community’s complex relationship with the disease and path toward recognizing it as a legitimate diagnosis for women and men.

In Case You Missed It

In this month’s Narrative Matters, “Medical Myths: Unprepared For The End Stages Of End-Stage Kidney Disease,” clinical educator Farrin Manian tells the heartbreaking story of his father’s final days. After being diagnosed with end-stage kidney disease, Manian’s father opts against dialysis in favor of a “peaceful death,” but the reality is far more complex and difficult than expected.

from Health Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/1YFjRmw