Introducing a new monthly series — one word, and the gathered voices of our community. Our first word is Thresholds.

Medicine can be a strangely lonely thing to carry. You witness something on a Tuesday afternoon — a piece of news received, a hand held, a small brave moment in a hospital bed — and then you go home, and the world expects you to have dinner. Patients know this loneliness too, and so do the people who care for them: the sense of having lived through something that mattered, with no obvious place to put it.

We started HEART because we believed those moments deserve a place. Today we are adding something new, and it asks a little of you.

It is called In Common, and it is simple. Each month we will set a single word. We invite you — whoever you are, wherever you sit in the world of illness and care — to write us a short response to it. No more than 300 words. Prose or poetry. Then, at the end of the month, we will gather the pieces that move us and publish them together, so that we can read them the way they are meant to be read: as many voices on shared ground, none of them speaking alone.

You do not need to have written anything before. You do not need to call yourself a writer. You need only to have something true to say.

This month: Thresholds

We begin with a word that anyone who has spent time in a hospital will recognise. Thresholds.

A threshold is a doorway and the moment of crossing it. It is the sliding door of the emergency department at three in the morning. It is the line between well and unwell, the pause before you knock and deliver news that will divide a life into before and after. It is being admitted, and being discharged, and the strange weightlessness of being sent home. It is the first day of training, and the last day of a career. It is a diagnosis that moves you from one country of the body into another.

Write us yours. The threshold you stood on, or helped someone across, or could not stop them from crossing. It can be a scene, a memory, a single image held still. Whatever the word turns over in you, that is the piece we want.

How to take part

  • Send your piece by 31st July 2026 to narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com, with the subject line "In Common: Thresholds".
  • Up to 300 words, prose or poetry. One piece per person.
  • Tell us how you would like to be named — full name, initials, or unnamed — and, if you wish, a short line about who you are.
  • If you write about a real patient, please protect their privacy: seek their consent, or change the details that would identify them.

We read everything that comes in, and we reply. At the end of the month, the gathered In Common: Thresholds will appear here and on our Substack, and we will tell you the word for the month after.

For now, there is only the one word, and the door it opens. We would love to see what is on the other side of yours.

Write to us at narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com.