The Book
I didn't write to tell my story. I wrote to tell theirs.
Over six years of house call medicine in San Diego, I have sat with patients in their kitchens, their living rooms, their gardens — in the particular intimacy of spaces people actually live in, rather than spaces built for medicine. I have met grandmothers in cozy sofa chairs with old trees visible through the window behind them. I have spoken by phone with patients in the mountains, carrying diagnoses no one had thought to share with them. I have sat with people in their most vulnerable moments and witnessed something the conventional healthcare system rarely makes room for: the profound, healing power of being truly known by your doctor.
I am writing my first book.
It is a collection of personal essays — one for each of the questions patients carry quietly into every appointment and rarely speak aloud. Each essay answers one of those questions through story. Real human moments, told with care for the people who lived them, and with deep reverence for the trust they placed in me by allowing me into their homes and their lives. Each chapter is accompanied by one of my own original watercolor and ink paintings.
I am not writing this book for recognition. I am writing it because I believe patients deserve to know that this kind of medicine exists — unhurried, relational, presence-based — and that they are worthy of seeking it out. And I am writing it because I believe there are physicians who entered this work for exactly this reason, and who are still looking for the way back.
More details coming soon.
Pura Vida