They would fill St. Louis’ Busch Stadium more than twice, take every seat in 261 jumbo jets and fill each bed in Barnes-Jewish Hospital 85 times over. They are the more than 108,000 Americans waiting for an organ transplant. And for too many, a donor organ won’t arrive in time.

Every few years, as he pursues breakthroughs for one of the world’s most notoriously difficult cancers to treat, William Hawkins, MD, says he feels like the first man who walked on the moon. “When you have an idea, and you test it in the laboratory, and you find a new insight that no one else has known previously, that’s cool,” he says. “It pushes the frontier of cancer research that much closer to effective treatments for my patients. It really is like boldly going where no one has gone before.”

Whether it’s monthly menstrual cycles, pregnancy, childbirth or menopause, women’s bodies change a lot over a lifetime. But often, these life changes aren’t just physical. They can affect women’s mental health, too, in ways large and small.

Though people living in rural communities across the United States may be less likely to get cancer, they are more likely than people living in suburbs and cities to die from it. That’s what is known as a health disparity, a term that can sound rather abstract. The problem, however, is anything but.

When Jeannie Kelly, MD, MS, a Washington University maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, first arrived on the medical campus in St. Louis in 2016, she had already seen how opioid use can devastate a community. “I finished my training in Boston, where the opioid epidemic was exploding,” she says. While working there, Kelly saw addiction and overdoses. She was aware of the difficulties and dangers for pregnant women addicted to opioids, and the great risks to their babies. And she wanted to help.

Every year in St. Louis, the infants who die before their first birthday could have one day populated 12 kindergarten classrooms. That’s according to Flourish St. Louis, an infant mortality reduction initiative supported by the Missouri Foundation for Health.

Most of us have confessed, at one time or another, to feeling depressed. But often what we really mean is: I’m sad. Or maybe, I’m tired. Or bored. Actual depression, also known as major depressive disorder, is more than sad feelings. People living with this disorder may experience, among other symptoms, changes in appetite, suicidal thoughts, difficulty sleeping or oversleeping and a feeling of hopelessness.

A little girl has just been diagnosed with cancer, and her parents are facing a new and terrifying reality. Whys and what-ifs dominate their thoughts, and a feeling of helplessness threatens to overwhelm them. They would suffer the disease for her if they could, but they can’t. They would do anything for this to be over, for her to be OK.

Taking care of sick people is hard. Whether you’re staying home with a kid who has a fever, spending the weekend with a friend and her broken ankle or helping a parent age at home, the task, though done with love and concern, can take a toll.

He was young — still in his 40s — and facing a devastating diagnosis: congestive heart failure that would end his life too soon. Readily admitting that his own lifestyle decisions had brought him to this place, Mr. D (his name has been changed to protect his privacy) suffered from what could only be described as transcendental angst.

For decades, the list of standard treatments for many blood cancers has remained short and largely unchanged. But now there is a new entry on the list. If chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant fail to stop the cancer, doctors can harness a type of personalized immunotherapy that trains a person’s own immune system to attack cancer cells.

PHOTOS BY JAY FRAM

Stroke recovery depends on quick thinking and fast action for everyone involved, from bystander to surgeon. One team of specialists, working to shave minutes off treatment time, has risen to the challenge.