Musical Rounds

When I walked into this woman's hospital room, I discovered she was awake and intubated, which meant a machine was helping her to breathe and, as a result, she wasn't able to speak. Instead, she communicated with me by writing on a whiteboard. Together with her mother at her side, she shared about her devout faith, and her love for the beach. In a beautiful allusion to the poem, Footprints...

Allie never thought of herself as sweet. Her sister knows exactly why: she knows everyone's name, walks up to strangers, makes every person feel like they belong. Her whole family lives within ten minutes of each other. Her Zumba friends dedicated a class in her honor. Three songs fill the hospital room, the last one inspired by her loving character. "Something sweet," Melanie says. "For a sweet p...

A man meets Shelby the cello and decides he wants to go somewhere he's never been: a canyon in New Zealand, hunting red stag. As the low tones carry him into the landscape, he lifts his binoculars instead of his rifle, watching the stag rather than taking the shot. From there it's a walk through a pine forest, soft underfoot, sunlight breaking through the trees. Musical Rounds is a podcast...

A woman takes us to her favorite place on earth, which turns out to be a person: her husband. The man who taught her what safety feels like. She tells the story of spotting him across the pillow section at Kmart, throwing a pillow at him, and ducking. Thirty years later, she still calls him her blue light special, the one she got to pick out and take home. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people...

Meet a man who's lived the life of a hummingbird, with his family joining him in his garden for one last happy party. We hear stories from his youth waking up in the moat of an English castle with bats flying overhead, to decades of life lessons, and an everlasting joy for the "most amazing bird in all the world." Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life sto...

A cellist walks into a hospital room, and the most annoying sound in medicine becomes something unexpected. Meet Melanie Ambler and Shelby the cello, and the moment that started Musical Rounds. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  Hosted by cellist and resident physician Melanie Ambler (a...

A tale of radical acceptance. A woman who has had six cancers since age 23 shares why she stopped fighting — and started making friends. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  The people you will meet in this series are receiving palliative care, a field of medicine focused on comfort and d...

A beautiful glass doll is dancing in circles, trying to bring happiness everywhere it goes. It doesn't know it's broken. A story of Afghanistan, family, and a spirit that refuses to be extinguished. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  The people you will meet in this series are r...

A cabin in the Sierras where the kids sleep on the floor, everyone piles onto a Polaris, and you head as far into the woods as you can go. Then a diagnosis threatens all of it. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  The people you will meet in this series are receiving palliative care, a fi...

He used to clean a high school orchestra room and he can still hear every instrument. From a symphony hall in Mexico City to a hospital bed in California, he's still flying. Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  The people you will meet in this series are receiving palliative care, a f...

Musical Rounds is a podcast where people with serious illnesses share their life stories, and we transform them into live, improvised soundtracks.  Hosted by cellist and resident physician Melanie Ambler (and her cello Shelby), this series began as a year-long research project while she was a medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine.  During bedside sessions in palliative care at...