Contributing Writer Emeritus
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine
Amanda Rutishauser is a Class of 2016 medical student at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. She holds a BS in creative writing and microbiology from the University of Michigan and an MS in narrative medicine from Columbia University. She is the recipient of two Hopwood Awards and a William Carlos Williams Poetry award. She lives in West Michigan with her canary, Winston.
They are your first patients we were told. And like with later patients, with them we shared discovery, struggles and triumphs. I learned from each and every one, so much, so generously, each and every day. But unlike any other patients I will ever know, when I was with them I was in the presence of extraordinary grace and giving. And in those moments when the sky was darkening outside the windows and the …
It was a Thursday in November, a day that felt like neither Thursday nor November a few weeks after my diagnosis that hadn’t seemed quite right, either, and here it was, on the page: the perfect trap, the perfect analogy. The patient (My Name No closing parenthesis. Now perhaps you’re one of those people who thinks that a missing closing parenthesis is just another typo, like a comma too few or too many. Perhaps you’ve …
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine
Amanda Rutishauser is a Class of 2016 medical student at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. She holds a BS in creative writing and microbiology from the University of Michigan and an MS in narrative medicine from Columbia University. She is the recipient of two Hopwood Awards and a William Carlos Williams Poetry award. She lives in West Michigan with her canary, Winston.
