At a certain point you can't do this by case study, and that's why you assign novels to medical students, healthcare students, because you need density of perspectives. But they can't read more than 250 words without losing patients/patience. They never have any time. So you have to cram everything in to have a page at most. So how do you cram it in? 

There are two mothers in the room, let's just try to take one. The one was born to a woman who had munchousins by proxy because of untreated traumatic stress around the near stillborn birth of a baby boy the year prior. The "near" means heart wrenching gasping attempts to cry. As a result, that woman's earliest memories are all of hospitals and procedures that were unnecessary, and injections of antibiotics that she became subsequently allergic to nearly to death, and her baby teeth rotted out of her head before anybody thought to maybe treat the mother, The Knife. And so a medical humanist was born and grew up in the seventies when secondary sex characteristics were valued prominantly.

That is just one character, and not the important one, in the room.

Everybody's backstory is more important than that one's. Her only importance is she's wallpaper 👁

The guy in the bed who could have died and left a family completely unprotected and unprovided for is most essential to this story. But he could easily be occluded by an entire floor of patients, all black, all who are very similar to him. So similar it's hard to see them as individuals for many of the people who keep them alive. And unbelievably, the people who keep him alive are often threatened with death of the same kind that he's threatened with: bad health insurance; bad debt to income ratio; bad work/life balance - suffering and gritting their teeth and grinding through, same same same. 

The wallpaper has given her entire life to this. She has been a patient as long as she can remember. She has been a parent almost as long as she can remember. She has been hellbent to be a storytelling-teacher for healers for almost as long as she's been a parent. All the lives in the room circle her like pesky cats trying to dominate the narrative. 

She knows what she wants right now, but she can't have it even if she could figure out how to give everybody else what it is they need. So what's the point of all this trying?, she often laments, as she keeps it up.