Several years ago, my practice included palliative care for people with late-stage cancer.  In this realm where no one survives, many of my assumptions as a health care provider were challenged.  Among the things that people facing death taught me to reconsider were the judgments underlying… Read full post »

Theresa Brown, RN, writes a periodic NY Times blog  that gives us a glimpse into the beautiful and awful stories that occur on a hospital oncology floor. This week, she wrote about privilege, money and health care reform: her story was of a VIP patient on the cancer floor receiving china-and-lin… Read full post »

Waitresses, sex workers, mothers, child care workers....all are included in the welcoming arms of a feminist ethos that values the work of women in society. Women in historically male occupations such as lawyers, physicians, business managers, and such are allowed entry, too.

But not nurses. Why?

Mis… Read full post »

As mentioned in a previous post, at 7:10 on a Saturday morning, I assumed the care of two Trauma Intensive Care patients.  In bed #3 lay a restless, unkempt, dirty, alcohol-addicted Hispanic male, 42 years old, whose eye was kicked out by a bunch of young thugs. The contrast between him… Read full post »

At 5:39, I was dreaming. At 5:40, hoping the alarm was only a remarkably realistic dream feature, I tried to resist awakening. I failed.  So I crawled out of my queen-size haven and headed for the coffee pot.  Waking early is actually a good thing; today I'm working in the Trauma… Read full post »

Undoubtedly you've seen the Nurse Jackie ads occupying every sidebar and banner ad on the Internet.  Perhaps you've read my previous posts about the inadequacies of the popular media in representing nurses.  All of those less-than-completely-truthful rearrangements of electrons notwithstand… Read full post »

I cannot stomach television medical dramas. I cringe as gross misrepresentations of handsome doctors, submissive nurses, absent clerks, transporters and housekeepers spew forth rapid-fire from across my family room. I roll my eyes at physician omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, cackle knowing… Read full post »

Another Day in the Life of an Intensive Care Nurse

7:10 a.m.  I got report on a 43 year old alcoholic, comatose from liver disease, and a 73 year old woman with emphysema and heart failure brought on by an adulthood of smoking and obesity. When she stopped smoking, she got… Read full post »

In the Trauma intensive care unit, tragedy abounds. People wind up here after shooting each other in trivial disputes; they get drunk and smash  their cars and bodies; heart attacks make old men plow Cadillacs into trees; feckless pedestrians get broken by careless cell phone talkers.  We s… Read full post »

Monday morning

My two assigned patients for the day were a developmentally disabled Latina whose lungs had failed (we thought because her brain had failed, but no one really knew) and a very lovely older woman who was too well for the ICU. I had the pleasure of saying good-bye to… Read full post »

You've no doubt heard the statement before: U.S. health care is  broken. We spend more of our GDP on health care than any other country in the world, but our outcomes are inferior.  Much widely- cited top-tier medical research takes place on American soil, with American minds and American m… Read full post »

Part I

It was June 3, 1976, when my sister Joan and her husband Ted went on their very first outing as a couple after the birth of their son. Aaron had been born nine months earlier, to the great joy of all of his family. He was the first local… Read full post »