Sheltering in Place for Beginners    Are you awake? You have relied on anesthesia during the scapel’s trusty removals. In the ice melt of morning    sit still, read jokes. Wind predicts drought. You will grow  strong in your heart’s ribbed hospital. Become the blue   rising up over your bed. Wake to smell a […]

The jammed hallways packed emergency room, the ICU.  I could feel the mounting panic in the chest  of the staff making it difficult to breathe. The sweat beneath their scrubs  and yellow long-sleeved gowns. Their latex gloved hands, N95’d mouths plastic shielded faces. I could see the underground corridor that connected one part of the […]

When I meet Peter, he is the first patient I’ve cared for in almost a full year who is capable of smiling. During this pandemic, almost all the patients in our ICU have been so critically ill that they could not smile. They were intubated and sedated, a tube sticking out of their mouth and […]

Nursing is defined by providing care for the sick, further defined by Florence Nightingale as utilizing our environment to provide care for the sick to aid in their recovery.  Even back in 1856, Nightingale saw the connections between environment and health, health and community, community and environment: “The health of the unity is the health […]

         Kristen dies suddenly on a Sunday night. We hear about it on Monday when her younger sister Jeannie comes in for dialysis, but Kristen doesn’t. Kristen was eight-years-old, and shared a genetic defect with Jeannie. Both girls require dialysis and need kidney transplants. Transplants are costly, even with insurance, so their […]

      Gallows humor and a healthy level of dissociation when necessary have carried me far in my career. During my nights in the ICU a decade ago I learned these as helpful tools of the trade. Death was all around us and we did our best to strip it off with our scrubs […]