Profile

Shara Yurkiewicz is a third-year student at Harvard Medical School. She was an AAAS Mass Media Fellow, and her work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Discover, and The Best Science Writing Online 2012. She is interested in medical ethics and has served as guest editor for the American Medical Association's ethics journal Virtual Mentor. She conducted ethics research at Harvard, Yale, and the Hastings Center and received a B.S. in biology from Yale. Shara's previous blog can be found at This May Hurt a Bit. Follow on Twitter @sharayurkiewicz.

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“Good patients” cover their emotional cracks

By Shara Yurkiewicz | March 13th, 2013 |

When we told the patient and his family that the mass in his lung was highly concerning for cancer, he didn’t say anything. His daughter asked about his symptoms. His son-in-law asked when and how he could get a definitive diagnosis. His wife asked when he could go home. Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry for [...]

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Unkept Promises

By Shara Yurkiewicz | February 9th, 2013 | 3

“Your hands feel like velvet,” the 94-year-old woman told me as I pushed on her abdomen in the emergency department on a Friday night. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” I told her. “That’s pretty sad,” she said, and her abdomen quivered as she suppressed a laugh. I walked out of [...]

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An Introduction: Sharing Stories with Strangers

By Shara Yurkiewicz | January 17th, 2013 | 5

“I woke up forty days ago,” began a 922-word email sent to me shortly after I shared a story about a demented patient continually waking up to discover that he had had a leg amputation. I read it and re-read it, astounded by the story that was over twice as long as my original post. [...]

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