Where It Hurts invites us to peer into the space between health and illness, life and death, through the voices of the people who work on medicine's frontlines: doctors, nurses, EMTs, therapists, and more. In raw and revealing essays, stories, and poems, they share what it's like to deal with difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, private doubts, painful failures, and the victories that keep them going.

By turns conversational, spare, urgent, poetic, plain-spoken, heart-rending, and heart-mending, each piece offers a glimpse into the extraordinary daily realities of those charged with taking care of us at our most vulnerable.

• A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself while performing a life-saving procedure.
• A nurse wrestles with caring for a woman accused of murder.
• A neurologist recalls how learning the art of pole dancing helped her through residency.
• A GI fellow serves us an unorthodox "cure" for an ER regular with a dangerous love for fajitas.
• A surgeon-poet imagines inviting Death over for tea.

Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, hate, wonder, joy: They're all part of a day's work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.