nurse stories

Thanksgiving 2023

Laura Fry November 22, 2024 15 Comments

It has been years, decades really, since I have watched television. I have the box, watch movies, but haven’t had cable ever. My two children were in first and second grade when I divorced their dad, and the house we moved into had no reception.

“Oh, well,” I told them, “no TV.” They were too little to grumble, but years later my daughter thanked me, saying, “We did so many other things.”

Now I find myself newly single and in transition for the winter, living in a rented house with—you guessed it—a TV with a full complement of channels and full reception.

Checking Our Assumptions

Fidelindo Lim October 15, 2024 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

“Don’t leave menus in the apartments!” a voice called sternly as I stood by the elevators in the building where I live.

The speaker was a substitute doorman I’d never seen before. I was holding a plastic bag typically associated with Chinese takeout food, and I realized that he assumed I was there to deliver meals to weary or sedentary New Yorkers.

A variation of this scene took place another time with a different doorman.

Hearing Impaired

Abbey Pachter April 26, 2024 28 Comments

“Pick up the phone, Mom,” I said, dashing into the kitchen after answering our landline in the living room.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Dunno. I can’t understand what they’re saying,” I said.

When she picked up the receiver, the caller—her father—got right to the point: “She can’t hear.”

The Visible-Invisible Divide

Atalya April 16, 2024 9 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

Most days, people don’t see my disability. I don’t generally wear a brace or use a wheelchair or even crutches.

“I would never know that you’re in constant pain,” a kind professor once said. “When I see you, you’re always smiling.”

“You don’t look sick,” friends always tell me.

I’m twenty-three. I want to be like my peers, but for me, every day is a balancing act—literally.

Nontraditional

Lawana Bradley-Brown April 2, 2024 20 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

I have always been different. As a nurse I was a late bloomer, though I’d always felt passionately drawn to the profession.

I was born to nurse. This was evident even when I was a young child; I bathed my grandmother’s amputated leg while the other kids played in the yard. Although I had planned to go to nursing school after graduation, I took a seventeen-year detour and ultimately entered as a nontraditional student.

Being Different: My Struggle and My Motivation

Mariama Joazard February 20, 2024 12 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

When I was in elementary school, I was bullied by my peers into believing that being different was bad.

I grew up thinking that speaking my mind was undesirable if my thoughts didn’t mirror those of others. To my peers, liking the “strange” foods of my parents’ Haitian cuisine, such as tripe or oxtail, was weird. I wore my older brothers’ hand-me-downs, which led to incessant teasing at school.

Although I grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts—a mostly Black, Haitian and Cape Verdean town—much of this negativity came from kids who looked like me.

Saved

Esther Joseph Pottoore June 16, 2023 22 Comments

It was a spring afternoon in Kottayam, Kerala, India, and I was a seventeen-year-old student, doing my final two years of high school at a local college, as could be done in India. I was the student-body president, with just two months to go until graduation.

And in another five minutes, I was going to end my life.

The Last Beat

Yehudit Reishtein January 20, 2023 18 Comments

It was midmorning at the hospital where I was a clinical medical-surgical instructor. I was standing at the medications cart with Sally, one of my third-year nursing students. One of the floor nurses approached.

“You have Anna in Room 44, don’t you?” she asked Sally.

Sally nodded.

“You better go in there,” continued the nurse. “She doesn’t look too good.”

My Abortion Story

Abbey Pachter August 19, 2022 14 Comments

I am a seventy-year-old Jewish grandma and a retired women’s health nurse and educator. I’ve enjoyed many blessings.

And I had an abortion in 1974.

Three months ago, the constitutional right to abortion was reversed. Reflecting on that Supreme Court decision led me to share my own experience. I hope my story will help other women considering an abortion to know that they are not alone.

How Poetry Broke My Heart

Cortney Davis May 27, 2022 33 Comments

On June 2, 2010, I was giving a poetry reading at the faculty club at Columbia University Medical Center in New York as part of their “Literature & Medicine” series. I still have the list of poems I read that day, poems that spoke of my work as a nurse practitioner. One poem described my examination of an abused woman; another recounted the experience of a young teen, raped by her sister’s boyfriend. Other poems concerned the mysteries surrounding death as well as the joys of healing.

Somewhere halfway through the reading, I developed what is aptly called crushing chest pain.

When Worlds Collide

Cynthia Stock March 4, 2022 5 Comments

Malcolm sat in the ICU bed, propped up on pillows to ease his breathing. At seventy-five, he had suffered respiratory complications after open-heart surgery. He’d been on a ventilator for several weeks before gradually being weaned from it.

Malcolm’s blue golf cap hid a bald pate surrounded by a fringe of silver hair. He always seemed to be smiling, comfortable with himself and what life had thrown his way. His smile had grown even warmer over the past weeks as we’d gradually formed a bond of intimacy.

Caught in the Middle

Marilyn Barton October 8, 2021 14 Comments

One day several decades ago, after morning rounds, Dr. Prescott slipped into the ER where I was the cardiac nurse. She did something a doctor would never do: She placed her leather medical bag on a stretcher instead of on the desk. Her eyes locked onto mine.

“I’m having a heart attack,” she said calmly.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nurse stories

Thanksgiving 2023

Checking Our Assumptions

Hearing Impaired

The Visible-Invisible Divide

Nontraditional

Being Different: My Struggle and My Motivation

Saved

The Last Beat

My Abortion Story

How Poetry Broke My Heart

When Worlds Collide

Caught in the Middle

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nurse stories

Start typing and press enter to search