After finding out that her toddler has cancer, a fiction writer and her husband living in the American Midwest do everything they can to save their baby, including giving up her artistic integrity in order to pay for the medical bills.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.

Having been hospitalized for a long time, a young girl finds herself surrounded by people who cannot understand the strangeness of her illness. After her friend visits her, she must accept that her relationships may never be the same, and that her expectations that tether her to a life outside of the hospital may be very different from the disappointing reality.

A mother struggles to come to terms with her son's mental illness, and begins to realize how poorly society treats people like him.

Daughter Helen reflects on her pained childhood and strained adult life while on a train in Germany, where she is traveling to Munich with her sick mother to get an unconventional treatment for cancer.

After his mother leaves to work as a nurse in Rwanda, a child's hypochondriac father diagnoses him with all kinds of different ailments. He uses these misdiagnoses to explain away his son's silence and strange behavior.

An overprotective mother attempts to get her teenage daughter to tell her why she is so upset. In an erratic and panicked conversation, the daughter reveals an unimaginable problem they must tackle together.

A woman leaves her island home to serve at a créche on the mainland in a poor area of the city. There, she falls in love with one of the children she cares for and wants him as her own, but his mother commits a crime that puts the boy out of reach.

A dying boy lies in his hospital bed dreaming of home while his father comes to terms with the knowledge that nothing is enough to save his son.

When his father loses his job in 1970s Cape Canaveral, a boy finds himself torn between an inhospitable home life and a burgeoning friendship with the terminally-ill girl down the street.