I don’t write as much these days as I’d like. And until I began writing some non-fiction pieces about my experiences in medicine last year, I probably hadn’t written a personal narrative in over three years. The process is somewhat disquieting. Accuracy and authenticity and honesty and feeling can be shifting features on a zero-sum scale.
One of these pieces is called “Florence,” and it appears today in Pulse—voices from the heart of medicine, a site dedicated to creative nonfiction and poetry about health care. I get their stories in my email every week, and I actually read them, unlike the way I mean to read other stories that arrive in my mailbox but do not.
You can read it here.