The belly is so bad that Mrs. Alves, a woman in her 40s, is worming uncomfortably on the E.R. stretcher. “I need an answer,” she says. I promise her that pain medicine is on the way. What I can’t promise her — despite countless tests and specialists’ opinions already on record — is the definitive answer. The diagnosis, the root cause of her symptoms, proves elusive. But her distress is real. And when there’s distress, there’s a story.
To be an emergency physician for nearly 30 years is to be humbled again and again by the mysteries of the body and the humans inhabiting them. Mrs. Alves is one of an endless number of patients I’ve seen with the urgent need not just for a diagnosis or treatment of some kind, but to be heard, to have an ear turn its clinical
