New York Times – Page 2 – Nursing Stories & Other Tales

WHEN CANCER IS NOT CANCER

I was standing in front of the light boxes hanging on the wall in the breast surgeon’s office staring at the mammogram films of my left breast. The surgeon pointed to lesions that resembled a galaxy of twinkling stars in my milk ducts. The Milky Way. A bad joke. “You’ll need a biopsy,” she said.…… Continue reading WHEN CANCER IS NOT CANCER

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Originally posted on Write Along with Me:
As she lay dying from pancreatic cancer, Nurse Martha Keochareon wanted to do more than plan her funeral. So she called her alma mater and offered to become a “case study” for nursing students. She reasoned she could help students learn about the dying process while, at the…

GUN CULTURE

When we were traveling in Ireland this past October, our Irish tour guide told us that Ireland did not have a “gun culture” as we did in the States. Never having heard that opinion expressed before, the term “gun culture” stayed in my head. After the recent killings at an elementary school in Connecticut, I…… Continue reading GUN CULTURE

THE BIASED EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

On Monday mornings I flip the pages of the New York Times past the international and national news to the New York City Metropolitan Diary. Here stories are written by New Yorkers about happenings in their daily life. The stories make me laugh, cry, or shake my head—only in New York. This story, written on…… Continue reading THE BIASED EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

DEMISE OF THE PHYSICAL

Back in the early ‘80s when I ran a not-for-profit clinic on the west side of Chicago for older people before annual physicals were considered “nonspecific” or “inefficient” or “potentially harmful” [“Let’s (Not) Get Physicals” (Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, June 3, 2012)] I did a complete head to toe exam on each patient who registered, including vaginal…… Continue reading DEMISE OF THE PHYSICAL

A Nurse By Any Other Name—

I read the New York Times article, A Small Picture Approach to Health Care last week with so what’s new thoughts hopping in my head. Sure, the economics of funding health care services continues to be a challenge but we nurses can see the real change agent of this model’s Advocate Health Care approach is the…… Continue reading A Nurse By Any Other Name—