• The Murder Building

    Originally posted on February 19, 2012    When I visited a patient in my caseload that lived in an “unsafe” part of the city, I went in the morning. Right after the pimps and drug dealers had called it a night and before the shop keepers pulled up the bars over the store windows and…

  • A Story You Won’t Soon Forget

    For the past ten years, I wrote my book in isolation. Long hours in front of my computer at my home, or a coffee shop, library and on Amtrak traveling between our home in North Carolina to Washington DC or New York City, and in other spaces I can’t remember. Wherever the location, I rarely…

  • A Broken Man Who is Hard to Forget

    Richey rolled himself in a manual wheelchair into the exam room of the spinal cord clinic for the first time on a warm spring day in April. He managed to lift his quivering right arm to shake my hand. I was the new nurse practitioner in charge of his care. He had some ability to…

  • Dream Deferred 

    Dream Deferred  by Langston Hughes   What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over– like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does…

  • Letting Go of the Life We Plan

    “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ― Joseph Campbell I didn’t plan to write a book but that’s what happened. I had always wanted to be a writer and, even as I worked as a Nurse Practitioner, I took…

  • Excerpts From My Book

      My book will be published on November 6, 2018 by She Writes Press. I have changed the title over the course of writing the book so many times that I can’t give you a count. The latest one, and I do hope the final one, is Stories from the Tenth-Floor Clinic: A Nurse Practitioner…