Posts

  • THE WEIRDEST HOME VISIT

    When I worked in the home care program at a VA hospital in Illinois, medical students sometimes came along with us nurse practitioners while we made our visits. I enjoyed showing them the reality of delivering care in the patient’s home—where we were guests—the subtle line between suggestion and decree, education and instruction, doing for Read more

  • SELECTIVE STUBBORNESS

    The first chapter of my book opens with my grandmother telling me in her fractured English I shouldn’t be a nurse. Her garlicky breath still resonates in my olfactory recollection. This chapter has been critiqued once in a master class at an annual writer’s conference and work-shopped at least twice in writing groups. So when Read more

  • THE AGONY OF EDITING

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be doing edits to my manuscript—finally. Especially after spending years writing and rewriting and changing and revising, making chapter four chapter one and later dropping chapter one altogether and replacing it with what was once chapter one in 2006. So clearly I’m in the home stretch. However, I Read more

  • NURSES REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE

    Betsy, a writer friend, emailed me the story she had read in our workshop since I had to miss the class. She knows I hang on every episode of her life in Ireland where her second child was born and she negotiated the daily vicissitudes of a different culture. In this episode she had left Read more

  • GET THE FACTS RIGHT

    GET THE FACTS RIGHT

    My first job as a nurse was at the Jersey City Medical Center. I had just graduated from nursing school and had taken the NJ State Board of Nursing exam. Since I hadn’t heard the results as yet (snail mail in 1962) I signed my name with a GN meaning  “graduate nurse” rather than RN. Read more

  • BE GOOD TO YOUR READER

    I took Stein with me to Monkey Joe’s and settled into a black leather vibrating chair in an area devoted to parents, grandparents and other responsible adults while the men’s semi-finals at Wimbledon played on one TV screen and some guys tossed a basketball on the other. My three grandsons scampered towards the inflated jumpy Read more