Airway: A place for doctors to share their stories
Friday, July 18, 2025
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Posted by: International Narrative Practices Association
On June 7, 2025, the Brooklyn Library hosted an open mic event for doctors called Airway. Like storytelling platforms ranging from the National Storytelling Network to local poetry and rap slams to veterans’ storytelling circles, Airway
has, over the past decade, become both an outlet and an opportunity for doctors to release the trauma, regrets, and successes from daring and desperate moments in their practices. These events are filled with drama, sprinkled with insider humor, and
infused with palpable relief, offering space to testify and give voice to some of the most difficult and life-saving challenges practitioners face nearly every day.
Popular culture has long been captivated by doctors’ stories, from Anton Chekhov to Oliver Sacks to Danielle Ofri. Since the 1960s, medical dramas have seized mass audience attention: Marcus Welby, M.D.; Quincy M.E.; M*A*S*H; and
even early-80s TV soaps like General Hospital immersed viewers in the personal, professional, and romantic minutiae of doctors' lives. ER marked a turning point, introducing a new generation to medical storytelling in the early aughts.
There’s something irresistible about the lives of our healers, lifesavers, and health storytellers. Airway celebrates storytelling as a means of helping heal the healers.
So here’s a question: What do you do to manage your professional stress? What is your organization doing to help employees stay connected? Whether you’re in education, a nonprofit, or a for-profit venture, we’d love to hear from you. Write it. Record an audio vignette. Craft a rap. Pen a poem. Paint a picture. Narrative Mindworks is your runway for sharing the moments that are shaping and impacting your career.
-Lauren Manning
Airway is an open-mic storytelling event for doctors to share their experiences of being a physician, started in 2015 as a local event among residency programs in New York City by Maimonides emergency physicians Mert Erogul, MD and Joshua Schiller, MD. Featuring a performance by guitarist and composer Roberto Granados.
For more than 10 years, Airway has been presented citywide and has since become a staple at academic assemblies and hospitals around the country. Airway supports and encourages a humanity-based perspective of medical practice, encompassing the practitioner, patient, and society at large. Airway was staged for a public audience for the first time at BPL’s Night in the Library on March 8th.
Maimonides Health is Brooklyn’s largest healthcare system, serving over 320,000 patients each year through the system’s 3 hospitals, 1,800+ physicians and more than 80 community-based practices and outpatient centers. The system is anchored by Maimonides Medical Center, one of the nation’s largest independent teaching hospitals and home to centers of excellence in numerous specialties and Maimonides Midwood Community Hospital (formerly New York Community Hospital), a 130-bed adult medical-surgical hospital; and Maimonides Children’s Hospital, Brooklyn’s only children’s hospital and only pediatric trauma center.
Participants
Dr. Mert Erogul is an emergency doctor at Maimonides Medical Center and co-founder of Airway Stories. He has written for
The Guardian, The New York Times, The Threepenny Review among others.
 Dr. Nakesha King graduated
from Weill Cornell Medical College and completed her general surgery training at The Ohio State University. She completed her Masters of Science during her research sabbatical concentrating on tissue engineered vascular grafts at the Center of Regenerative
Medicine of Nationwide Children's Hospital. She returns to New York as a General and Trauma Surgeon as well as an Intensivist in the Department of Surgery at the Maimonides Medical Center. In addition to her clinical duties, she enjoys participating
in residency education and community outreach.
Dr. Joshua Schiller is currently an Attending Physician, Director of International Programming, and Director of Social EM for
the Department of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a Master of International Affairs with a Certificate of Expertise in Middle East studies from Columbia University and trained in Emergency Medicine at Stony
Brook University Hospital. He is also a co-founder International Medical Response, a charitable nonprofit, which sends teams of doctors to areas of most need to support education in Emergency Medicine, and just recently returned from an on-going project
in Ukraine. He is a big believer in the power of stories and encourages residents (as well as anyone else who listens) to read as many books as possible outside the profession to gain perspective and context to the work that we do.
See More at: https://airwaystories.com/
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