Richard Wolkomir and Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

This article appeared in the April, 1998, edition of the Smithsonian Magazine. It won several national writing awards, including the American Society of Journalists and Authors June Roth Award for Medical Journalism and the Clarion Award. It takes readers through a single workday at a small hospital with two exceptional nurses and a physician.

Hour by hour, we see these medical professionals shoulder staggering responsibility for the well-being of others, and offer kindness to people who may be in no position to say "thank you." We learn that sometimes people shopping beside us in stores, even our neighbors, may perform work of great drama and profundity. We learn something about the complexity of modern medicine. We glimpse the complexity within our own bodies. And we learn that for each of us, whether we think about it our not, the possibility of death is always with us.

A central character in this article, unnamed, is a woman undergoing treatment for acute myelogenous leukemia. That woman is one of the authors of this article--so the story becomes a kind of "thank you" to two nurses and an oncologist, who saved a life.