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Latest Voices
Night Blindness
Five o’clock a.m. is an almost holy time for overnight ER staff. An eerie calm blankets the air, and the promise of sunrise fuels us to finish the last two hours of another marathon shift. Medicated patients have drifted into a deep slumber, and the parade of stretchers from the ambulance bay has finally come to a halt.
Not in My House
Work/Life
“We lock the door and shut the curtains, and, when its all clear, we line up in a special order and listen to what our teachers tell us.” –My kindergarten daughter, Zelia
They say work to live not live to work but how do you come home crushed by a forty-eight-hour shift on sixty minutes of broken sleep and kiss your babies and tell them it’s all going to be okay when their school is on lockdown due to a nearby shooting and the suspected gunman is still on the loose as you tend to a patient with
Line of Fire
My patient was dying, and her son was angry. She was eighty-nine and buckling under the weight of septic shock. With his mother failing, her son had lost it. “You will regret letting her die!” he said as he lunged at me. He was intercepted but continued to stare me down. I tried to hold his gaze as softly as I could, willing him not to kill me.
Pistol Pain
I grew up in a gun-free family and neighborhood. As a child of the 1950s and 1960s, I associated guns with the Westerns I saw at the movie theater or with the Lone Ranger, the hero of my favorite TV show.
Then guns intruded on my life–twice.
To Sleep, Perchance to Die
Hidden Wounds
A Ruffled Mind
A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. –Charlotte Bronte
A few years ago, after retiring from a long career as a psychologist, and when I was deep into an MFA program in writing, I wrote a poem exploring the reasons, past and present, for my intermittent, middle-of-the-night insomnia.
Nobody Is Watching
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