I’m always keen to hear someone’s story. As a doctor I never felt satisfied with a mere description of symptoms. I remember one junior doctor presenting a patient’s “case” to me. They’d spent a long time with the patient and had meticulously recorded every symptom which was described. After about three A4 pages of this I had to say, “I hear all these descriptions but I can’t see the patient. Who is this person?” It wasn’t possible to understand them without enabling them to tell a narrative. I was lost in their forest of symptoms and so were they.
One of the commonest questions I’d ask was “When did you last feel completely well?” You’d be surprised how that would turn a story of a symptom which had been present for a month or two into a life story stretching back several years. From that “beginning”, we’d piece together a narrative, following one connection after another.
Only those stories enabled me and the patient to make sense of their illness, to understand them and to help them move forward.
When I look at the trees in this photo today I always wonder – how did they get together? When did they connect like this? What we’re the circumstances? I’d love them to be able to tell me their stories.
By the way, we might tell our stories in quite a linear, chronological way, but that’s only one way to tell them. Our lives are complex, cause and effect is neither linear, nor simple, but the factors, the themes and the patterns still appear within our stories.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Great post today. Our stories are so important. In the US most Doctors aren’t that interested in your story which is sad.
Hard to make progress without knowing the person. In my experience the diagnosis is only partial (and therefore incomplete) without the story. We have to contextualise everything we learn about someone. Data is just never enough