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.

A woman's chronic illness stirs up long-suppressed conflict within her family. As she helplessly listens to her husband and brother-in-law argue about the best treatments, she wishes she could be there to defend her troubled husband.

When her son is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, a woman on a job in England must find her way home and balance her work in architecture and life with her family in Chicago.

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.

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

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.

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 brother and his sister disagree fundamentally on how to care for their dying mother. Death approaches sooner than anticipated, leaving the brother feeling lonelier than ever.

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.