I set out to investigate ideas of meaning and value in medicine using the creative tools of speculative fiction, a largely untapped area within the medical humanities that encompasses a broad collection of fictional genres dealing with elements that do not exist in reality, such as futuristic, supernatural, and other imaginative themes. I wanted to ask what it means to be here, a trainee in transition, in a field unavoidably invested in imagining, from new therapies to alternative endings for distressing patient encounters.

I first undertook a good deal of reading, expanding my exposure to speculative fiction as well as personal essays, narrative medicine, and medical fiction. I drafted, workshopped, and iteratively revised three speculative fiction short stories to submit to literary journals for consideration for publication: “Anticipation,” “Notes from the Basking Unit,” and “A Case Series of Necessary Detours.”

I wrote these stories because they tease out what it feels like to confront the unfamiliar and the inexplicable in doing the work of healing and caring for other people. Storytelling is itself a method of reflection and sense-making, allowing room for not knowing; for feeling what hangs in the balance; for grieving, hoping, and understanding. These stories are formed around the core of so many people–writers, friends, patients, others–who are woven into my experiences and continue to shape me. “Anticipation” centers on hearing someone say, talk to me, tell it to me, and balancing on the edge of news that shatters everything. It takes on what I did not or could not say. “Notes from the Basking Unit” considers loss and limits, being and doing enough; and “A Case Series of Necessary Detours” draws on what writer Maria Popova characterizes as the terror of our own temporality, contemplating the fracturing of time and finding a way forward.1

The outcome of this project, apart from three stories put forth for publication, has been the opportunity to sift through experiences that may have offered little time for reflection in the moment and to see what sinks and what surfaces. Considering the words of writer Esme Weijun Wang, I am asking why, and what on earth do I do now? 2 Drawing from author Maggie Nelson, I want to believe that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it. 3 Like poet John Stone, I am feeling the space between alone and lonely and asserting that there is a difference. 4 I am, as we all are, making my own sense with the experiences and tools that I have. This project traces the threads of meaning I return to, asserting unapologetically that it matters what we allow ourselves to imagine the world to be.

1 Popova, Maria. “A Curious Herbal: Gorgeous Illustrations from Elizabeth Blackwell's 18th-Century
Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants.” The Marginalian, 9 Mar. 2023,
https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/01/29/elizabeth-blackwell-curious-herbal/.

2 Wang, Esme Weijun. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2019.

3 Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Melville House UK, 2016.

4 Stone, John. “Gaudeamus Igitur.” NPR,

https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/jul/bellevue/johnstone.html.