The Nocturnists

This week’s guest on The Nocturnists is optometrist Tiffany Chan, who told a story live onstage at an event produced by Dr. Rebecca George at the Sierra Valley Health Center in Nevada City, California, in 2025. Tiffany grew up in the Gold Rush town of Grass Valley, built a career in elite academic medicine at Johns Hopkins, and ultimately found her way back home after her mother’s sudden brain ble...

What if falling in love meant literally falling down? In this week’s episode of The Nocturnists , physician and writer Frances Southwick shares a story that begins in rural Colorado with unexplained episodes of paralysis. First performed live in Nevada City, this episode is about what it’s like to live inside a body that responds to emotion in unexpected ways, and how a late diagnosis can reframe...

This week on The Nocturnists , we hear from Alicia Ashorn and Anthony Thigpen , two community health workers with the Transitions Clinic Network who are redefining what care looks like beyond the hospital walls. Alicia and Anthony share their personal stories—Alicia’s journey through addiction and recovery, and Anthony’s path through grief, transformation, and reentry work—and how these experience...

This week, we’re joined by Sharon Fennix —a hotline coordinator with the Transitions Clinic Network (TCN), a community leader shaped by lived experience, and a storyteller whose creativity helped her survive 38 years of incarceration. Sharon’s journey has taken her from running fashion shows and directing original plays inside prison to becoming a trusted source of support for people navigating th...

Dear friends, Nurse practitioner Linda Wick has spent more than four decades in medicine, beginning her journey as a six-year-old watching nurses care for her injured brother. In today’s story, she recalls the early lessons that shaped her career—from the strict nuns who taught her at the College of St. Scholastica to the life-and-death responsibilities of the ICU and dialysis unit. When a medical...

This week, I’m joined by Sarah Auna , a birth doula whose story we first heard live on stage at Intersections , a live storytelling event produced by the Center for the Art of Medicine in Minneapolis in 2024 through our program, The Nocturnists Satellites . In her story, she takes us into a freestanding birth center, where chaplain Katie labors surrounded by her family, her midwives, and the stead...

This week, I’m joined by Dr. Meghan Rothenberger, an infectious disease doctor whose story we first heard live on stage at Intersections , a live storytelling event produced by the Center for the Art of Medicine in Minneapolis in 2024 through our program, The Nocturnists Satellites . Meghan grew up feeling uncertain and disconnected from her body. As a teenager, she struggled with an eating disord...

Today I’m joined by Chaplain Betty Clark , a hospital chaplain, community leader, and lifelong caregiver, and Dr. Jessica Zitter , a critical and palliative care physician, author of Extreme Measures , and filmmaker. Their friendship sits at the heart of the new documentary The Chaplain and the Doctor , born from years of working side by side at Oakland’s Highland Hospital. Together, they’ve built...

Dear Friends, What does it mean to write about illness in fragments? How can children’s questions reveal a kind of collective philosophy? On our 70th episode of Conversations , I speak with the writer Sarah Manguso , whose work moves effortlessly between memoir, aphorism, and essay. I first encountered Sarah’s writing in Two Kinds of Decay , her account of living with CIDP, a rare neurological dis...

Today, we're releasing a special bonus episode featuring Emily and our "uncertainty correspondent" Alexa Miller, in conversation with the ABIM Foundation. Together, they reflect on the key insights from creating the Uncertainty in Medicine series. Thank you to the ABIM Foundation for hosting and recording this webinar. To sign up for a webinar in the future, visit buildingtrust.org/webinars . Find...

In the series finale, we explore a different type of uncertainty—the uncertainty that arises around the healthcare system itself. This episode follows Ed Stratton, a stage IV cancer patient who beat his cancer, only to be denied a life-saving liver transplant by his insurance provider. His daughter Erin, armed with industry knowledge and unshakable determination, teams up with a healthcare whistle...

What does it mean to live well in a world where nothing is certain — not in medicine, not in life? In this episode, we follow a high school teacher who asks his students to examine “the good life” through philosophy, Buddhism, and existential inquiry. We meet two women — a Buddhist monk and a disability rights advocate — who bring spiritual wisdom to the messy realities of illness, caregiving, and...

Today, we explore the paradox of mortality: something both certain and utterly unknowable. Through a haunting parable from Ursula K. Le Guin and stories from doctors and loved ones, we hear what happens when people try to plan for death—or avoid it. A daughter processes her mother’s calm decision to pursue assisted dying. A physician grapples with an ambiguous advance directive. A neurointensivist...

Today, we step inside the studio of visual artist Leila Simon Hayes, whose bold, shape-driven designs are born from a process rooted in imperfection, intuition, and trust. Through her story, we explore how Leila’s creative practice helped her navigate decades of chronic pain and medical dismissal, eventually leading her to healing not through certainty, but through listening—both to her art and he...

Today, we explore the hidden layers of communication in medicine—what gets said, what doesn’t, and how uncertainty lives not just in the clinical data, but in the space between people. From a telemedicine encounter with a stubbornly independent patient in the Santa Cruz mountains, to a deeply personal story of navigating breast cancer risk, and finally to the ICU, where one physician is trying to...

Today, we step into the dance studio with improvisational dance artist Chris Aiken, whose work lives at the intersection of uncertainty, movement, and presence. With insights that resonate far beyond the dance studio, Chris explores how attention, poetic instinct, and even failure are essential tools for responding creatively under pressure—much like an ER doctor at a moment of crisis. Find show n...

This week, we explore how time and uncertainty are intertwined in the practice of medicine. A toxicologist faces a split-second decision in the ER that could mean life or death for a young patient. A woman with chronic ankle pain spends years searching for answers as dozens of doctors offer snap diagnoses and failed treatments. A rheumatologist navigates the slow, murky waters of autoimmune diseas...

When a 7.6 magnitude earthquake leveled entire villages in Pakistan, retired U.S. Navy Admiral Mike LeFever was thrust into the heart of the disaster with no playbook and a simple directive: provide humanitarian aid and strengthen U.S.-Pakistan relations. In this episode, LeFever recounts what it was like to lead a massive relief effort in the chaotic aftermath—coordinating aid, rebuilding schools...

What happens when doctors have to make life-or-death decisions in an evidence-free zone — and patients are left to navigate the unknown? In episode 5 of “Uncertainty in Medicine", we bring you three gripping, real-life stories: a neurosurgeon weighing impossible risks in the operating room, a palliative care doctor facing a young man’s quiet resolve to die, and a patient whose long-awaited kidney...

What does uncertainty in medicine have to do with Chernobyl? According to patient safety officer Dr. Ron Wyatt, more than we might think. In the fourth episode of our "Uncertainty in Medicine" series, he draws a chilling connection between one of history’s worst nuclear disasters and the quiet, preventable tragedies that unfold in hospitals every day. In both cases, the warning signs were there. P...

In episode 3 of the "Uncertainty in Medicine" series, patient Dana undergoes a routine knee replacement and expects a straightforward recovery. Instead, she’s plunged into a baffling and relentless illness—one that defies diagnosis and leaves her life in limbo. As her symptoms intensify and specialists write her off, Dana finds an unwavering ally in her primary care doctor, the one person who refu...

On this episode of Conversations , Emily sits down with the creative team behind The Pitt —a gripping new medical drama on HBO Max that’s making waves in the healthcare world and beyond. Joining her are showrunner R. Scott Gemmill (ER, NCIS: LA), physician-writer Dr. Joe Sachs (ER), and emergency medicine educator and EM:RAP founder Dr. Mel Herbert. Together, they go behind the scenes of the show,...

Step inside Alexa Miller’s classroom, where paintings become portals and doctors learn to see like patients. In this episode, Alexa leads a powerful exercise called the “image circle,” where clinicians reflect on their own experiences of medical uncertainty and choose artworks that speak to those moments. What follows is anything but abstract—through close looking and deep conversation, participan...

In the premiere of the "Uncertainty in Medicine" series,  The Nocturnists explore medicine’s uneasy relationship with not knowing. From the clean resolutions of medical dramas to the structured rituals of case conferences, the culture of medicine often treats uncertainty as something to be avoided, resolved, or explained away. But what happens when uncertainty is not just a temporary gap in knowle...

Our Uncertainty in Medicine series launches next week, and to set the stage, we’re sharing one of our favorite episodes from the archives - a heartfelt conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about his journey through the healthcare system while living with chronic Lyme disease. Medicine likes certainty - diseases we can see and test for and treat. But what do we do when we can't s...