Santosha Veeramachaneni – a young woman who feels compelled to write short stories. For this student in the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV Class of 2025, their importance is undeniable, incontestable.
For as long as she can remember, she’s always appreciated the healing power of a good story.
“We look to stories to give us hope for the future, to inspire us, and to commiserate with us when we're feeling down. Throughout my childhood, when the world seemed to be too much to handle, I always looked to characters who overcame obstacles that seemed overwhelming.”
The main character in her favorite book as a child actually was her, a little girl who overcame seemingly overwhelming odds to fight off a type of heart valve disease.
It is a story that ultimately had much to do with her deciding to become a physician.
“Instead of pictures of dragons, my favorite book had scans of echocardiograms and photos of a struggling infant that my mother pieced together. It’s a story I know by heart. I was born with pulmonary valve stenosis, quickly leading to heart failure, and doctors rushed to perform open-heart surgery. They spent all night working tirelessly to save me. After an arduous week, my relieved parents could finally take their baby home. Though I was too young to remember the experience, the story my parents recounted … that was in my mother’s scrapbook … profoundly impacted me. Sitting in my cardiologist’s office as a child, I often traced the scars on my body and marveled at the echo displaying my heart. Every visit, I threw questions at him. How do EKGs work? What was a murmur? Instead of dismissing my incessant interrogation, my doctor took care to teach me, pointing at my heart’s chambers and valves on the echo. And so as a child, I saw the physicians who saved my life and became my mentors as the heroes of my story … they sparked my interest in medicine.”
Veeramachaneni, born and raised in Las Vegas after her parents immigrated here from India, says her earliest positive memories of Las Vegas were going to the Spring Valley Library. “I was so excited for story time and to start reading on my own … I remember coming home after and trying to draw my own picture books with rudimentary stories to go along with them.”
Her time at Hyde Park Middle School and Clark High School, both STEM-focused magnet learning centers, served as a catalyst for her growing interest in science and speculative fiction, a genre that encompasses works in which the setting is other than the real world, involving supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements.
“I first really got interested in science when I began to ask questions about the world and found out my parents and teachers didn't have all of the answers. It made me realize there still is so much left to discover in the world and I wanted to be a part of discovering it. Even though I always wanted to be a doctor, I remember believing that I would be the first to invent a time machine. I still haven’t cracked that one … I’ve loved writing speculative fiction because it helps me contextualize a world that seems really uncertain at times … I need to express myself.”
Though she has a large box full of short stories – some she wrote as an undergraduate while majoring in political science and minoring in chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University – she has yet to try to get them published. Just as she says she’s not ready yet to practice medicine yet without the necessary education – she’s considering specializing in psychiatry, pediatrics, or child and adolescent psychiatry – she believes she has more work to do in the writing craft before trying to join a long list of popular physician-writers that include Anton Chekov, Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen, Nawal El Saadawi, and Danielle Ofri.
“I very much want to get published,” Veeramachaneni says, “I’ll know when I’m ready.”
In “Long Distance,” one of her latest short stories, Veeramachaneni writes about the loss one of her main characters, Elizabeth, feels when her best friend in a small town, Carmen, decides to relocate for an engineering job with a company that has built a virtual simulation of reality that one can transfer their consciousness to. Conveyed in the nearly 5,000 word story are themes of grief, letting go, and barriers to communication. The story ends with a grieving Elizabeth looking through a telescope one night from the top of a hill, just as she and Carmen did as young girls.
I just look up into the night sky, each star so clearly visible without the lights of the town and pick one to yell at … I think about her eyes lighting up when she talked about something I didn’t understand but somehow I loved it anyway … I don’t remember much of what I say to the stars. I’m fueled by whiskey and anger at first, and then I begin to cry … I wake up in sweat and dirt and tears, and the sun meets my eyes. I walk back to my house, where my daughters will be back soon … It’s a new day on a dying Earth, and she isn’t here. And she never will be again.
At this point, Veeramachaneni – her father’s an engineer and mother a pediatrician – doesn’t know if speculative fiction will be the only genre she writes in for short stories and novels. Most physician-writers, stay in present day reality, developing compelling fictional narratives out of what they’ve seen: difficult pregnancies and births, the emotional and physical pain caused by horrific accidents and crime, disabling illnesses, the frustrating challenges of aging, agonizing bereavement, gruesome deaths – and the many magnificent marvels of modern medicine.
What she does know is that as a doctor she’ll definitely be dealing with stories.
“A physician’s mission is to heal – to diagnose and treat illness and advocate for their patient’s health. To do this job, a good physician listens to their patient’s stories and encourages them to be vulnerable through building trust and empathy. What is medical history to a physician include patients’ treasured stories and memories of relatives. What’s more, a physician’s duties go past the walls of a clinic. As health care advocates, physicians advocate for the voices of vulnerable populations, giving people a platform to share their stories to improve access and equity in the community.”
