When patients cross through the doors of a clinic or ICU, they don’t magically cease to be artists, advocates, caretakers, or community leaders. The same holds true for health care providers, and CHEST 2024 attendees will have the chance to reflect on the unabridged stories of their lives during the third annual CHEST After Hours.

“The human element sometimes gets lost among all of the didactics and other aspects of daily life,” said CHEST Scientific Program Committee Member, Kara L. Dupuy, MD. “We’re focused on learning and being a good clinician and taking care of our patients, and we don’t always talk about the human side of us—what we do outside of medicine, what we did before medicine, and the parts of us that make us the person who we are.”

Five chest medicine clinicians have crafted 10-minute narrative performances around these aspects of their lives, which they will share on Monday, October 7, from 6 pm to 8 pm ET, at Laugh Boston, located in the Westin Boston Seaport District hotel, next to the convention center. For the first time, CHEST After Hours has partnered with the Nocturnists Satellites initiative, which provided participants with expert coaching and workshops from the producers of the award-winning medical storytelling podcast, The Nocturnists.

This year’s CHEST After Hours will invite presenters and audience members alike to consider the theme of “My Revolution,” recalling times when they stood up against the status quo or experienced a profound personal transformation. For Scientific Program Committee Chair, Gabriel T. Bosslet, MD, FCCP, that moment came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he found his voice as an advocate for public health. Dr. Dupuy, a classically trained pianist, discovered a more complete sense of self after reintegrating musical performance into her busy life as a clinician. And Rana L. Awdish, MD, FCCP, experienced a revolutionary understanding of hope and certainty in the face of a cancer diagnosis. All three presented at the inaugural After Hours at CHEST 2022, wrote about their experiences in the Exhalations section of the journal CHEST^®, and have helped organize the subsequent two events.

At its core, CHEST After Hours is a celebration of humanity and empathy in medicine and a tribute to the connective act of storytelling. In addition to being one of the oldest and most authentic forms of human communication, storytelling serves an essential role in clinical interactions, Dr. Bosslet said.

“Patients tell us their story, and we sort of fashion it, form it, around our medical frameworks to try to give medical meaning to that story. In my opinion, the art of medicine is the art of hearing stories,” he said. “In this case, After Hours makes us the teller of stories, and that kind of flips it on its head.”

Sharing difficult experiences or vulnerable aspects of oneself can also be an act of narrative restoration, allowing storytellers to uncover their own strengths and resiliencies and gain new, life-changing perspectives, Dr. Awdish said. CHEST After Hours also helps to reinforce important values for the next generation of clinicians.

“CHEST is an organization that really embraces everyone’s full humanity and wants to showcase aspects of members that maybe have not traditionally been part of medicine,” she said. “That makes us all better and is a great model for trainees and people entering our profession to know that they can still be whole and embrace all of these different aspects of themselves.”

RSVP now to reserve a seat at CHEST After Hours.