An Introduction to Parallel Charts

When I talk to my mom on the phone, I often share a story from work. Usually it’s funny, something a patient said in passing that made me stop in my tracks and laugh. And when I am done telling the story, she always asks without fail, “Do you write these down? Do you journal about this?” 

And I say “yes” but what I really mean is I rarely write down the happy stuff. I usually scrawl a sentence or two, about exchanges that have left a pit in my stomach, written in haste on the back of my daily schedule or the cognitive assessment that I’ve just administered. I jot down only enough to feel like I’ve gotten it off my chest, when in reality I haven’t even skimmed the surface as to why I feel unsettled. I still think about words said by patients I treated years ago, am still haunted by things disclosed to me at the bedside of people who are sick & dying. 

And so I decided to start Parallel Charts,  a newsletter containing anecdotes about the patients I’ve interacted with as a healthcare worker and the ways they have impacted my life. These stories will be mostly true with major identifying details omitted or changed to protect privacy. These stories will be both light & heavy, and I will be conducting research in order to provide additional context as needed. 

I am starting Parallel Charts in an effort to build a deeper understanding & connection with the patients I see and my community at large, to learn more about U.S. (and world) history, and to grow not only as a writer but as a clinician and human too.

This newsletter is named after a technique pioneered by Dr. Rita Charon, which I learned about while reading Anna Quindlen’s book, Write For Your Life.

Charon describes the concept like this, “If your patient dying of prostate cancer reminds you of your grandfather, who died of that disease last summer, and each time you go into the patient’s room, you weep for your grandfather, you cannot write that in the hospital chart. We will not let you. And yet it has to be written somewhere. You write it in the parallel chart.” 

 Thank you for reading! All grammatical errors are my own. Shout out to Beyoncé’s new album RENAISSANCE for keeping me company while I wrote this post.