Tuesday morning, eight o’clock, and I have seven things to do. Check vitals, change a dressing, get a patient out of bed, send another to the operating room. Review lab results, give medications, start a blood transfusion.
I have six patients, and they have an average of five morning medications each. I make three trips to the med room for supplies, two trips to the pantry for fresh water.
Tamar Rubinstein
Editor’s Note: One week ago, a deeply troubled young man carrying a semiautomatic assault rifle and two pistols broke into a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school and shot 26 people to death before killing himself.
Twenty of the victims were six- and seven-year-old children.
I Promise: A Mother’s Response to the Newtown Shooting Read More »
Craig W. Steele
Quo Vadis Nursing Home haunts the east side of Erie Street,
squatting opposite Roselawn Cemetery, whose wrought-iron gatesÂ
gape tauntingly wide and welcoming. Today will soon be buried:Â
three wizened men sit rocking, speechless, on the front porch,Â
yearning for the shadowed marble and granite headstones,
no longer afraid of death, only of dying–suspended
between fear and need, stoically awaiting
the next busload of grade-schoolers determined
to brighten their deep-shadowed days.
Editor’s Note: Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as “remember your mortality,” “remember you must die” or “remember you will die” [from Wikipedia].
About the poet:
Craig W. Steele is a writer and university biologist whose creative musings occur in the suburban countryside of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he writes for both children and adults. His poetry has appeared recently in The Aurorean, Poetry Quarterly, Astropoetica, The Lyric, Popular Astronomy, Spaceports & Spidersilk and at Stone Path Review, where he was the featured poet this fall.
About the poem:
“My grandfather spent the last few years of
Ray Bingham
I entered the hospital by a back door. It was evening. As I walked down the quiet corridors, their cinder-block walls, green paint, tiled floors and soft fluorescent lighting granted me a superficial sense of familiarity: I’d walked these halls countless times over the last five years.
Now, however, I also felt a bit apprehensive. I was not supposed to be here.Â
Two weeks before, I’d been laid off. It had been the second round of staffing cuts in six months–due, the administrators said, to declining revenues. They made this claim despite the continued high numbers of patients in my unit, the newborn intensive-care unit, or NICU.Â
As a veteran nurse, I’d spoken up. The cuts, I’d said, were leading to understaffing, to increased stress among the nurses and to declining care for our fragile patients. Soon after, they’d canned me.Â
Not risking the elevators, I climbed the stairs to the third-floor landing outside the NICU. I had a flimsy pretext for visiting: I wanted some of my former colleagues’ phone numbers to use as job references. Mostly, though, I just missed
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