Support for the Nocturness comes from the California Medical Association.

The season of The Nocturness is sponsored by the Physicians Foundation.

At the Nocturnus, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with health care privacy laws.

Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality.

All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer. You're listening to the Nocturness, stories from the world of medicine.

I'm Emily Silverman.

Today we speak with medical student Melanie Ambler, who is also a cellist and

shares a story about the most memorable cello concert she's ever performed, which happened to be

over Zoom with an audience of only one person. In addition to her medical studies at Stanford,

Melanie works as a musician on call for Project Music Heels Us,

which you'll hear more about in the conversation that follows her story.

She graduated from Brown in 2019

and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study music and dementia in France.

Melanie told her story live at the nocturnous show in San Francisco in June of 2022.

And then, as you'll hear in our conversation, again in Chicago in September 22,

at a special show that we did at the Women in Medicine Summit.

And it's that second performance that you will hear in this episode today.

In the conversation that follows, we'll talk about Melanie's love of her instrument, her experience working with the nocturnous story coaches, and a bit more about the work that she's doing at the intersection of music and medicine.

I know you'll enjoy Melanie just as much as I did.

Here is Melanie's story.

It's been a bad week.

I've had this lingering cold for over three weeks and I've been coughing so much and every

...