A story in notes

For five years, I have been collecting medical anecdotes. They exist in a file of short stories, anonymised, and with invented names.

- Charlotte Grimshaw

There are encounters in the chaos of the ED, in crowded wards during Covid, in eerily underpopulated private hospitals. Lists of narrators include elderly parents, friends, relatives. There are accounts by patients, doctors and nurses. There are stories that are excruciating, funny, sad. Stories from the private front line, behind the public face. Addiction and rehab tales from a childhood friend who binges 60 units (about 48 standard drinks) of alcohol a day.

Scenes from the folder: Rose Smith waits while the new specialist scrolls through 25 years of her surgical notes. He turns and says, "I opened the file and my heart sank." Rose silently absorbs this. Out the window, a beautiful network of bare tree branches spreads against the iron sky.

Rose looks at his sensitive, kindly face and says, with a feeling close to hilarity, "And so to the next chapter in the horror story. The day I learned my surgeon had dementia."