Off the Charts

Old Friends Among the Devastation: A Red Cross Volunteer in the Oklahoma Tornado Zone

In 2011, after devastating tornadoes struck Alabama, we ran a series of blog posts, “Dispatches from the Alabama Tornado Zone,” by Susan Hassmiller, the senior adviser for nursing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Hassmiller went to Alabama as a Red Cross volunteer, and reported back to us with a number of moving and inspiring posts and photos. The recent tornadoes in Oklahoma are the occasion for a new series we are initiating today.

Eleanor Guzik, NP, RN, a volunteer disaster health services manager with the Red Cross, describes herself as a 74-year-old wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, traveler, serial volunteer, and a late-in-life RN who worked in critical care for 10 years, was an NP for 10, and retired in 1995. This piece by Eleanor Guzik describes her deployment and arrival in Oklahoma; subsequent posts by Guzik and other Red Cross volunteer nurses will give us glimpses of the day to day work of volunteers in Oklahoma and the people and situations they encounter.

Deployment and Arrival

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:07:16-05:00June 19th, 2013|Nursing|0 Comments

Evidence-Based Interventions That Improve Maternal and Child Nutrition

On June 8, in London, presidents, prime ministers, businesspeople, and philanthropists came together to sign the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact. The event, hosted by the governments of Brazil and the U.K. and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, resulted in commitments to accelerate progress toward improving nutrition for children and mothers around the globe.

In London’s Hyde Park, activists laid a carpet of flower petals to represent the lives of children lost each year through malnutrition. Photo by Ismar Badzic via Flickr.

Simultaneously, the Lancet published its second paper in a series on maternal and child nutrition. The authors of the study estimate that poor nutrition is the root cause of 45% of child deaths (3.1 million deaths among children under age five each year).

The report builds on a similar report from 2008 and highlights the progress achieved since then. For example, the number of the world’s children who never grow to their potential height has dropped steadily over the past two decades, from more than 253 million in 1990 to 167 million in 2010.

But according to the new report, far more can still be done. The authors estimate that close to 15% of all deaths in children under five can be prevented, and at least a fifth of all stunting avoided, if […]

Amy M. Collins, managing editor2016-11-21T13:07:17-05:00June 17th, 2013|Nursing|0 Comments

Incomplete Combustion: Crohn’s, Motherhood, a New Normal

April Gibson is an essayist, poet, and ostomate. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Chicago State University. In her writing she seeks to address and renegotiate societal beliefs about motherhood, illness as alienation, beauty as a shell. Her work is published or forthcoming in Tidal Basin Review, Reverie, The New Sound, Aunt Chloe, AsUs and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her two sons.

Twenty-one days pass. I am a 90-pound bag of skin. Legs like peanut butter drapes thrown over femur bones, no muscle, no pronounced curve. A lover would look past me quickly in the street. I do not want these scars, or this strange body. I want to wear a red bikini. I want a kiss on my belly.

Three weeks felt like spans of small forevers. I didn’t believe my legs and arms were mine. My abdomen sunk to a cave, save for the rustling bag. My aunt hurled the word “unconscionable” on each visit, until the hospital knew her voice. My mother, grandmother, aunts, they stayed in mornings, my little brother stayed through late nights, nodding off once the drugs snatched my eyes to sleep. So many people, one could’ve mistaken my bed for a box. I can’t remember them all, or even all the days.

The nurses were there everyday, same ones. This is their wing. The doctors came […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:07:18-05:00June 14th, 2013|Nursing, patient experience, Patients|10 Comments

Science and Suffering: My Two Months Battling the Aliens

By Ronald Pies, MD, professor of psychiatry and lecturer on bioethics and humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York; clinical professor of psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston; editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychiatric Times. Dr. Pies is also the author, most recently of, The Three-Petaled Rose, an exploration of the synthesis of Judaism, Buddhism, and Stoicism (iUniverse).

Doyle Alphabet by fdecomite, via Flickr

It all started suddenly: weird, creeping sensations in my forehead and between my eyes, especially when I lay on my back or bent my head forward. The expression “my skin is crawling” quickly came to mind. Over the next few days, I began to experience intense pressure in my forehead and a weird sensation on the bridge of my nose—as if a large clothespin had been clipped onto it. Within a few days, it felt like someone had poured a sack of concrete into my head.

My self-diagnosis was sinusitis—a term that covers many etiologies. But most cases of sinusitis begin with head or facial pain and nasal discharge—not the strange sensations my wife and I soon started calling “the aliens.”

Nevertheless, I began an aggressive self-treatment program: decongestants, aspirin, and something called a Neti pot—an ancient form of nasal irrigation using a […]

Guest Author2018-03-27T16:37:04-04:00June 12th, 2013|Nursing|3 Comments

Sexual Assaults: Is the Military Finally Starting to Get It?

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

March 26, 2010: A poster supporting the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program. (U.S. Navy photo illustration/Wikimedia Commons)

On June 7, the U.S. Air Force command named Maj. Gen. Margaret H. Woodward director of its Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. She replaces her predecessor, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, who was charged with sexual assault in early May.

Announcement of his arrest came the day before the Department of Defense was to hold a press briefing to tout changes intended to improve the handling of sexual assaults. Also on June 7, the U.S. Army command suspended Major General Michael T. Harrison, the commanding general of the U.S. Army in Japan for failing to “to report or properly investigate an allegation of sexual assault.”

At the press briefing, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said he was “outraged and disgusted” at the allegations against Krusinki. Hagel also asserted that “ [a]ll of our leaders at every level in this institution will be held accountable for preventing and responding to sexual assault in their ranks and under their […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:07:19-05:00June 10th, 2013|nursing perspective|0 Comments

Old Friends Among the Devastation: A Red Cross Volunteer in the Oklahoma Tornado Zone

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Evidence-Based Interventions That Improve Maternal and Child Nutrition

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Incomplete Combustion: Crohn’s, Motherhood, a New Normal

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Science and Suffering: My Two Months Battling the Aliens

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Sexual Assaults: Is the Military Finally Starting to Get It?

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