Where It Hurts

A moving look at the challenges and triumphs of caregiving, told through candid literary accounts by more than 60 doctors, nurses, and other healers

Where It Hurts invites us to peer into the space between health and illness, life and death, through the voices of the people who work on medicine’s frontlines: doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more. In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, they share what it’s like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going.

By turns conversational, spare, urgent, poetic, plain-spoken, heart-rending, and heart-mending, each piece offers a glimpse into the extraordinary daily realities of those charged with taking care of us at our most vulnerable.

A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself while performing a life-saving procedure.
A nurse wrestles with caring for a woman accused of murder.
A neurologist recalls how learning the art of pole dancing helped her through residency.
A GI fellow serves us an unorthodox “cure” for an ER regular with a dangerous love for fajitas.
A surgeon-poet imagines inviting Death over for tea.


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.