Thoughts on Stories, by Esther Lee

Thoughts on stories (photo by Joy Moy)

I’ve been thinking about the purpose of writing. I’ve joined a creative writing circle on BGU camps and we are meeting early this week to talk about the pieces we’ve worked on. I haven’t started yet, and I’m not sure how far I’ll get with it today. It’s been a quiet, odd weekend. The clouds were heavy in the mornings and there’s talk of rain. It’s an odd feeling when the atmosphere has yet to decide if it’s going to pour, or dry the ground underneath it.

I think the reason we write is manifold. For me, sometimes I write because I process best through writing. Most often I like to write by hand: 0.4mm black ink on firm Moleskine paper (I admit I’m a snob when it comes to paper). Sometimes I write because I have to, like these blog posts and the poem I need to start; sometimes it just comes and I write in the moment.

We have been communicating by the written form for a long time. But before words and symbols, we depended on oral traditions and story-telling. Sadly most of our oral traditions have petered out. How many of us grew up listening to stories from our grandparents/parents/relatives/that crazy uncle? How many of us remember those stories? Will we pass on our stories to the next generation? Most of us have even outgrown handwritten letters and have stopped passing notes in class (now we do the silent messaging thing on our smartphones).

All of us have stories. We carry them with us wherever we go. Sometimes they are heavy, a foggy mess of emotions vs. logic that refuse to untangle with time. Some of our stories are wondrously knitted together and testify to the power of grace. The stories we carry with us build over time. They are important to share with others. And as students of medicine and as global health advocates, I think it’s important that we care about the stories our patients bring when they come in with their chief complaint.

Most of us will have to talk to our patients regardless of our preference, our shyness, the patients’ desires etc. The charts will give us hard data, but patients aren’t a neat conglomeration of numbers and percentages. We are in medicine not purely because of the logic to it; we are in medicine because we truly care about people. Caring for people means understanding. And understanding comes from communication, and communication comes from listening to their stories. Ultimately, how we interpret data is based on how well we know the patient.

I was talking the other night with some of my peers on the topic of reading fiction (“stories”). It’s hard to set boundaries for yourself, so that every waking moment of your day you aren’t a slave to Firecracker (a question bank of sorts for med school).But I believe it’s important to make those boundaries for yourself. To do things that relate to people, whether that’s volunteering here in Israel, reading stories, taking the time to really enjoy a conversation… Part of the reason why I’m trying hard to read and write in med school is to remind myself of the power of stories and communicating them. When my patient approaches me, I want to be curious about their story. How did they get here? What’s the real reason behind the physical symptom that brought them here? What are they really afraid of? How does their culture or religion affect how they think about the illness? These are the questions we need to keep with us as we begin our lifelong commitment to global medicine, even now as students. Patients are not puzzles to be solved, or problems to be fixed. We must not forget our patients are real, walking and talking stories, just like us.  

- Esther Lee, October blogger of the month