To Be Carried: What One Woman Taught Me About Clinical Practice
By Max Powell
As medical students, we are conditioned – often unconsciously – to prioritise the quantifiable. We communicate in numbers, lab values, and scoring systems. We learn how to identify pathology and apply management. But there are moments in our training when the language of medicine feels insufficient – when a patient, without intending to, reorients our understanding of what it means to care.
Our Clinical Humanities project began with a clear intention: to explore experiences of ageing and isolation within the community. What emerged, however, was not an abstract study of loneliness, but a textured account of one woman’s life. In engaging with her story, my perspective on medicine began to shift.
She had already given so much – to her family, her church, and now to us. From the first interview, she was open, steady, and deeply generous. Her voice had the cadence of someone who had long made peace with hardship. Widowed at a young age, she had raised her children alone. Her husband had died of a sudden heart attack, leaving behind a final letter that read: “Where a tree falls, there shall it lie.” She remembered every word. She never remarried. Her life had been marked by absence, but never defined by it.
Visiting her at her home was a quiet privilege. We were greeted with warmth, ushered into a living room filled with family photos and personal touches that marked the story of her life. Her son – a constant, gentle presence – was often there too. He helped with the shopping, the heavier lifting, the things that had gradually become too much. She once said, in reference to her children: “They carry me now.” At the time, I didn’t fully grasp the emotional weight of her words, but as the project unfolded, I began to understand.
As we conducted interviews and photographed her space, we were mindful not to reduce her to a case study. This wasn’t about data collection. This was about encounter. I began to understand what it meant to hold a person’s story – not just record it. In transcribing her words, it became clear that her life had been shaped not only by illness, but by continuity, care, and a steadfast resilience.
Her story revealed how illness exists within a relational ecosystem. We often speak of patients in isolation – “a 75-year-old woman with hypertension and osteoarthritis” – but rarely do we ask: Who lifts her bags when she can’t? Who listens when she worries she’s not the person she used to be? These questions, I now realise, are not peripheral. They are central to clinical practice that respects the whole person.
Through our creative work – photography, curation, writing – I understood how storytelling can become a form a care. A way of restoring dignity in systems that can, at times, feel depersonalised. I remember one moment in particular, when we showed her a photo of her own hands. She studied it for a long time. “They’ve done a lot,” she said. There was no vanity in it – only recognition. Her hands, like her life, carried a history of their own.
The project reminded me that illness is not just clinical. It is existential. It reshapes identity. It alters dynamics. And while we are taught to seek diagnoses, we are not taught to sit with the uncertainty that often follows. In our patient’s case, the diagnosis was not the most important part of her story. It was how she continued living – how she adapted, how she let herself be supported without shame.
One of her handwritten notes read: “As soon as you feel you are not the person you used to be, seek help.” That sentence stayed with me. It reframed help not as weakness, but as a kind of wisdom. And that is a lesson I hope to carry into every consultation.
Reflecting now, I realise I learnt as much from being with her as I did from studying her experiences. She taught me that ageing is not a solitary act, but a shared one. That primary care and community medicine is not just about blood pressures and polypharmacy, but about recognising the unseen infrastructures of care – sons who shop, neighbours who check in, handwritten notes left in plain sight. And perhaps most importantly, she taught me that patients are not simply recipients of care – they are teachers. They show us what it means to age – to adapt, to endure, and to evolve over time.
To practise medicine through a humanities lens involves recognising and engaging with complexity, rather than reducing it. It encourages a more reflective approach – one that prioritises active listening and observation, without defaulting to preconceived notions or assumptions. In doing so, both our understanding of the patient and our approach to care can become more considered and complete.
When we titled our project To Be Carried, we were thinking of her, of course – but also of all patients who live between illness and wellness, between independence and reliance. In clinical medicine, we are often the ones doing the carrying. But sometimes, it is the patient who carries us – into deeper empathy, more intentional listening, and a more grounded understanding of what it means to care.