Stories of tennis courts and hospital wards, of Uganda and Georgia, of new mothers, dying friends, and failing systems were among those shared during the 9th Annual Stories of Yale Internal Medicine Medical Grand Rounds on June 12, 2025. These weren’t clinical case studies or policy updates. They were raw, personal narratives of caregiving and loss, of silence and advocacy, of medicine’s reach and its limits.
Unlike traditional grand rounds, these annual special grand rounds create space for reflection and shared humanity through storytelling. By inviting faculty, trainees, and staff to tell their stories, the event fosters a culture of listening. It is a reminder that medicine is not only practiced through knowledge, but through presence, empathy, and connection. Below are brief glimpses into the stories shared.
“The Collapse of Time,” by Benjamin Doolittle, MD, MA Div, professor of medicine (general internal medicine) and pediatrics, is a meditation on friendship, mortality, and the sacred rhythm of the tennis court. In tennis, as in life, we move through Kronos — the steady tick of minutes, hours, and years. But oftentimes, a match becomes something more: Kairos — a moment outside of time, where meaning breaks through. When Sean, Doolittle’s longtime tennis teammate, shows up to the national championships with stage IV cancer, the game transforms for their USTA team. “Our friend is dying, but some things are more important than winning,” Doolittle says. It is the last tennis match Sean ever plays.
“Mothers,” by Maria Koshy, MD, clinical fellow in the Section of Infectious Diseases, traces the delicate thread between clinical duty and maternal instinct. What starts as a standard consult for postpartum fever becomes a haunting parallel between physician and patient — two new mothers, two women tethered by the fragility of life. After the baby worsens, unable to fight off an infection, Koshy reads notes in the patient’s chart describing an impossible parting. “The mother, holding him for a few minutes, washing his hair, kissing his forehead, and giving him away.” This is a story about what medicine can’t fix — and the love that endures even when it fails.
“A Quiet Surrender,” by Sneha Saha, MD, hospital resident, confronts a patient whose resistance speaks volumes, challenging assumptions about agency and compliance. Andrew, a paraplegic man with festering wounds and a long history of saying no, insists on sleeping with his leg dangling off the bed — not out of ignorance, but as an act of defiance. “Perhaps the reason Andrew hangs his leg over the edge of the bed isn’t that he doesn’t appreciate the risk of falling but that it’s the only way he can assert control in an environment where he otherwise has none,” Saha says. What begins as a frustrating case transforms into a profound meditation on autonomy, powerlessness, and the quiet, defiant ways we try to survive within systems that strip us of our dignity.
“Please do better. Try harder. Do more,” by MarySarah Thanas, MPH, is not just a story; it’s a reckoning. As a longtime program coordinator and mother to a son with type 1 diabetes, Thanas delivers an account of how fragmented care and institutional neglect nearly cost her child his life. Caught in the no-man’s-land between pediatrics and adult care, he faces crisis after crisis — dismissed, delayed, and nearly destroyed. “Look at your patients as your child, brother, nephew — because they are someone’s,” she says. Her story is a call for wholeness in medicine: treat the person, not the diagnosis.
“A Mother’s Doctor,” by hospital resident Vy Tran Plata, MD, MS, AAHIVS, is a story about role reversals, ruptures, and returns. When a physician-in-training becomes her mother’s medical advocate, the exam room transforms into a battleground shaped by language, class, and care denied. With a white coat on her back and guilt in her throat, Plata confronts a system that failed the very woman who made her career possible. “With proper follow-up, her cancer could have been prevented,” she says. This isn’t just a story about medicine — it’s about what we inherit, what we owe, and what it means to come home wearing the white coat Plata’s mother never could.
“The Blind Man and the Elephant,” by certified nurse midwife Grace Lesser, MBA, MPH, CNM, is a meditation on witnessing — birth, loss, memory, and meaning. Told from a midwife’s dual vantage as clinician and patient, the story braids together the miscarriage of a Ugandan woman named Patricia with the narrator’s own. “Physiologic birth and loss is honored here and normalized. It’s sacred, but not precious.” Through quiet acts of care — offering water, wiping blood — Lesser explores what it means to be present in suffering.
These six stories are a glimpse into the powerful reflections shared at this special grand rounds. From grief and healing to advocacy and identity, each speaker offered a personal window into the human side of medicine.
Yale faculty and staff can view a recording of the event.
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