A patient becomes passive during her post-automobile accident surgery. She reflects on how ignorant her doctors are faces feelings of violation.

Plagued by an aggressive case of pneumonia and haunted by a dying neighbor, a sanatorium patient is advised to have his ribs resectioned, thus sending him into a panicked reflection on the inevitability of death.

A writer gives an account of his friend Dr. Tokai, a kind and sophisticated plastic surgeon who died after his first real heartbreak.

A doctor and a nun are on a train that makes a stop near a work camp where a Mexican laborer will die unless he receives emergency surgery from the unlikely duo.

On her drive to her hometown in Georgia, a medical student contemplates the recent death of her reckless friend and picks up a stranger with a cast on the side of the road.

In the waiting room of a plastic surgeon's office, a man asks the woman sitting next to him about the scar on her face.

A man whose body has suffered as a result of fetal alcohol syndrome persists on—despite the bullying and naysayers—as a successful pediatric surgeon and an accomplished wrestler.

A cancer patient undergoes her treatment and struggles to distract herself from the pain by remembering conversations with her ex-husband.

While driving a heart transplant to a patient on the verge of death, a man reflects on his past and the importance of his work.

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.