Sometimes medicine can be a hard field to be stay happy in. There can be difficult days where you lose a patient, or have to deliver news about a tough diagnosis, or days where you just can't seem to catch back up. We've looked in our Op-Med archives to bring you the stories that bring a smile to your face and warmth to your heart, to start your year on a positive note.
Those in medicine look out for each other.
In this story, a recently-matched physician learns something is wrong with his brother and finds an understanding family in his residency program members.
A Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician runs into a former attending of hers and realizes how small of a world medicine is.
Primary Care Is About Relationships
A doctor explains the reason he went into Family Medicine: to focus on the family and friendship he builds with his patients and colleagues.
Medicine is a profession fraught with meaning and love.
This psychiatrist says love is what drives her to answer a page at 3 a.m. and that we need to talk about love in medicine more.
Renewing My Vows to Medicine as a White Coat Ceremony Spectator
When this medical student revisits the white coat ceremony for her brother, she takes the opportunity to remind herself what she loves about medicine.
Clinicians get a front-row seat to the strength of the human spirit and the hope they are capable of.
How to Harness the Power of Our Stubborn Hope
This doctor waxes poetic on how patients and clinicians remain stubbornly hopeful for the best possible outcome, even when the odds suggest otherwise.
We Operate on the Body But Forget the Soul
A surgeon remembers a time his attending offered a patient a gift -- and the profound effect that had on their recovery.
Though hope can make a patient take chances on painful procedures at the end of their life, says this Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation doctor, it can also keep them holding on until they turn the corner.
Illustration by April Brust.
