The Last Patient of the Day

Fourteen years ago this month, my first “Meditations on Geriatric Medicine” column appeared in Caring for the Ages (January 2010). It was titled, “The Power of Story,” and I wrote then that the personal stories to which we are all privy as we go about our professional lives as caregivers contain within them the opportunity for personal growth. Nowadays, this process of viewing the caregiver–patient relationship through the lens of storytelling is its own medical subspecialty, narrative medicine.