MY COMA DREAMS tells a true story of love at the dividing line between life and death.  An HIV-positive jazz musician is rushed by his partner to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. A mild cough has become a massive infection, shutting down every organ in his body. The doctors put him into a medically-induced coma. Over the next two months, he enters a highly personal dream world, full of vivid experiences of confinement and release, of surreal comedy and ineffable beauty. He finds himself in hushed cathedrals; trapped in a cage beside jazz legend Thelonious Monk; careening through the night in a runaway van; dancing the tango in an impossibly luxurious airplane. Meanwhile, his partner fights through panic and despair to try to reach out to him across the gulf of consciousness, while negotiating the real-world complexities of his medical care. MY COMA DREAMS is jazz theater: theater propelled by music, words, song, and images in fluid and ever-changing combinations.

For More Information visit: http://www.mycomadreams.com

There will be two performances of MY COMA DREAMS: times will be announced as soon as they become available.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures, readings, and performances presented by scholars, clinicians, academics, writers, and artists engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are held on the first Wednesday of each month (September to May) from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.

For More Information visit: http://narrativemedicine.org

 Now a practicing cardiologist, Jauhar will read from his memoir Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.  Vincent Lam has called the book “A vivid portrait of the culture of a New York City hospital, with its demanding hierarchy and sometimes indifferent cruelty." (New York Times) 

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures or readings presented by scholars, clinicians, or writers engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are usually held on the first Wednesday of each month from 5 to 7 pm in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of such books as Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, A Leg to Stand On and Musicophilia, gives the final Narrative Medicine Rounds for 2008-2009. Dubbed the “poet laureate of medicine” by the New York Times, Dr. Sacks will speak on the topic of his next book: hallucinations and the life of the visual brain.From motor cars and chess sets, to people in fanciful headdress and even images of Kermit the Frog, visual hallucinations in people going blind are not born of memory, but are new inventions of the visual brain.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures or readings presented by scholars, clinicians, or writers engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are held on the first Wednesday of each month from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.

Nellie Hermann will read from The Cure for Grief, “a subtle, elegiac coming-of-age novel about catastrophe, grief and the persistence of everyday life. ...A gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival. Profound, poetic and original" (Kirkus Reviews).

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures or readings presented by scholars, clinicians, or writers engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are held on the first Wednesday of each month from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.

Perri Klass, pediatrician and author of classic medical memoirs A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training, will read from her new novel The Mercy Rule. Chris Bohjalian said, “Few writers write as beautifully or authentically about parenting.”

Narrative Medicine Rounds are lectures or readings presented by scholars, clinicians, or writers engaged in work at the interface between narrative and health care. Rounds are held on the first Wednesday of each month from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Columbia University Medical Center Faculty Club, followed by a reception. Rounds are free and open to the public. Students, staff, faculty, patients, friends, and interested others are warmly welcome to join us.