Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine

Candid literary accounts by doctors, nurses, and other healers shed light on the intense challenges and triumphs of medical life, reflecting the resilience, ingenuity, and compassion they use to get by.

In Where It Hurts, more than 60 doctors, nurses, therapists, EMTs, patient advocates, and other medical professionals offer a window into the space between health and illness, life and death as they share stories of difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, their own failures, and the successes that make everything worth it. What they feel, we feel, in highly relatable, beautifully written essays, poems, and short stories that are by turns conversational, urgent, plain-spoken, spare, poetic, heart-rending, and heart-mending.

A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself when intubating a young patient. A nurse contemplates how to act when tending to a woman accused of murder. A GI fellow serves up an unorthodox “cure” for an ER regular with a proclivity for fajitas. An intensive care physician recalls the surreal early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. A therapist carts a box of police reports, abandoned by a long-ago patient, to yet another new office.

Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, hate, wonder, joy: They’re all part of a day’s work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.