55 Word Stories
Submit Your 55 Word Story
We invite you to submit a 55-word story about your health care experience. Sharing our experiences in health care, especially during intense, emotional, or stressful times, increases our connectedness and well-being. Hearing stories from others helps us know we are not alone, and strengthens our community. The authenticity, compassion, creativity, and bravery of our colleagues help us access our own emotions, and help us carry on.
PLEASE NOTE THAT STORIES LONGER THAN 55 WORDS WILL NOT BE PUBLISHED ON THIS SITE. If you have already submitted a story longer than 55 words, and would like it published here, please revise it to 55 words or shorter and re-submit.
An easy way to keep track of your word count is to look at the bottom left of your Word document:
The goal is to write a story - in 55 words or less (or 55 exactly, if you are able) - to understand, appreciate, or process something about the impact, response, or practice of medicine and delivery of health care at this moment. The stories that are 55 words or less will be published to the site. If you have questions, please contact officeofwellbeing@umc.edu.
How to begin:
(Instructions adapted from Sheetz, A and Fry, M The Stories, JAMA 2000 Vol 283(15)1934)
- Focus on something that keeps coming to mind for you, could be a patient story, a canceled event, a fear, a celebration, a moment with a colleague.
- Quickly write down everything that comes to your mind, mixing fact, fantasy, supposition, if you like.
- Your story should be much too long.
- Then start cutting. Take away the less interesting, the unnecessary. Try to make one word do for two. Try to make information known without saying it in so many words.
We will identify ways to share stories in our UMMC community. With this in mind, avoid using names or specific identifiers in your stories.