In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street. Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn --- endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives --- no matter how little we live them.

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another --- from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.