My mom had a catastrophic stroke in December of 2017 – almost five years to the day after a more mild one – that ended her life at the age…
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Art Buchwald was a famous newspaper columnist! He even won a Pulitzer Prize, he was funny and he also had end-stage kidney disease. In 2007 he made a decision to…
What would you do with an 89-year-old woman who walks with a walker, and you find in “a fib” two years after her last ECG? I might not thin her blood. And just a…
Reflective writing is an important part of my spiritual practice and my wellbeing as a healthcare professional. I’m grateful for recent collaborations with The Human Touch, a literary journal for…
I first started making “house calls” to my home hospice patients in 1989. It was a privilege to be able to come into the house to see the patient in…
I had visited Mr. Williams several times over the last few months. In his early 60’s he had been diagnosed with lung cancer after years of tobacco use combined with…
“It’s not personal. It’s just business.” Is healthcare a business? Should it be a business? These are serious existential questions that need to be answered as palliative care works to…
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. This stanza from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes” has made its way into every essay I have written about…