Comic Nurse Blog

In the Wild #3

2009-11-05T03:17:00.002-06:00

Barnes & Noble, Rush Street, Chicago section.

Fies Interview Part Two

2009-11-05T02:58:00.002-06:00

Brian posted to his blog and Facebook page that, "...the last part of this interview is probably as cogent a statement of my philosophy of life and art as I'm capable of forming."

Interview with Brian Fies

2009-10-26T11:42:00.002-05:00

An interview I did this summer with Brian Fies, the fabulous creator of Mom's Cancer and, most recently, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, has been posted on Sequential Tart. Check it out!

Fall Walk & Beach Romp

2009-10-24T18:43:00.005-05:00

Alice and I had an amazing late day color walk and beach romp. Well, she romped with her pals, I just caught as many photos as I could. For more of the above adventure, see my Flickr Photostream.

Edith

2009-10-21T17:00:00.002-05:00

I'd bet old women wear shawls.
For the comfort.
When you're old
And have seen so much, so many pass
Leaving you behind
The comfort of a shawl is immediate
And lasting
And all you can hold to yourself
Plus you get cold easy
And the shawl helps
Especially if it's black
And super soft and from Sweden.

Edith said in her note she would be okay
Despite having just retired
As an AIDS nurse
And then being diagnosed
With cancer in her breast.

Did she have to die in October?
When everything
Is falling away
Orange yellow red leaves and pink ribbons
And I didn't know.

There are people in your life
Who are part of your architecture.
You don't need to see them
Just to know they are
In their lives, happily
Receiving grey hair and grandchildren.
It's as if they are weight bearing beams
Holding your being in place.

So when you get a call from her husband
That she's gone
And you didn't know,
All that weight collapses.
Unexpectedly,
The worse way.

If only I'd pushed harder and gotten her version of the story
Calling David "The Ultimate" and capturing forever her signature
"I kill you a thousand times"
And that laugh.
But I didn't.

I generally don't believe in regrets
But in this case,
They might be in order.

Edith, where ever we go
And you have gone,
I hope they are there with you,
Keeping you warmer
Than the best shawl ever.

Marathon

2009-10-12T10:08:00.004-05:00

Random Piece of Art #6

2009-10-07T10:09:00.002-05:00

Click on image to enlarge.

Nurse TV

2009-10-07T09:55:00.002-05:00

Through a suggestion to blog about the wacky history of nurse uniforms, I stumbled on an Australian You Tube series called Nurse TV. Most interesting of the episodes I watched is this segment on morgue nurses, which is a job I didn't know existed. This video is a fascinating first-person profile of the work. Even more interesting are the two comments that appear below the video. The first for its positing this as an ethical issue, the second for showing the primacy of the sex drive. Enjoy.

In The Wild #2

2009-10-02T10:07:00.001-05:00

Women & Children First, Andersonville, Chicago

The Trouble is Just Begun?

2009-10-01T14:17:00.004-05:00

Chicago is abuzz with anticipation regarding the Olympic bid announcement tomorrow. Whichever side is presenting their case, I keep thinking about the analogy to the 1893 World's Exposition, and Erik Larson's reporting of what the closest thing Chicago has known to tomorrow morning looked like 119 years ago:

"...two thousand people gathered on the sidewalk and street outside the offices of the Chicago Tribune, as similar crowds collected outside each of the city's twenty-eight other daily newspapers, and in hotel lobbies, in bars, and at the offices of Western Union and Postal Telegraph Company. The gathering outside the Tribune included businessmen, clerks, traveling salesmen, stenographers, police officers, and at least one barber. Messenger boys stood ready to bolt as soon as there was news worth reporting. The air was cold. Smoke filled the caverns between buildings and reduced lateral visibility to a few blocks. Now and then police officers cleared a path for one of the city's bright yellow streetcars, called grip-cars for the way their operators attached them to an ever-running cable under the street. Drays full of wholesale goods rumbled over the pavers, led by immense horses gusting steam into the murk above.
The wait was electric, for Chicago was a prideful place. In every corner of the city, people looked into the faces of shopkeepers, cab drivers, waiters, and bellboys to see whether the news has come and whether it was good or bad. So far the year had been a fine one. Chicago's population had topped one million for the first time, making the city the second most populous in the nation after New York, although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previous in second place, were quick to point out that Chicago had been cheating by annexing large expanses of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago, "the Windy City." - Devil in the White City, p.13.

Conference Notes : Violence & Medicine

2009-09-28T11:54:00.006-05:00

Chicago Stories:

Violence and the Ethics of Urban Health Care
Violence is Contagious. Can Medicine Find a Cure?

Friday, September 25, 2009

Sponsored by Northwestern's Medical Humanities & Bioethics program, and Center for Bioethics, Science & Society. Also the Donnelley Family Disability Ethics Program of the Rehab Institute of Chicago and the Erie Family Health Center, with a grant from the Greenwall Foundation.

Introduction by Kathryn Montgomery: “Narrative, research, and experience are being brought together at this conference to address the cycle of violence in Chicago.”

The Things they Carry: Violence & A City’s Health
keynote lecture by Alex Kotlowitz

The act of telling stories is an act of hope. How can we know and do nothing?

Violence as distraction from no job, no future, no hope. Poverty goes hand in hand with violence.The West Side’s foreclosure rate is twice the rest of the City’s rate.
Street shrines to the victims bloom like flowers. RIP is tattooed and scrawled all around.

Leek Funeral Home director: “Homicides are linked to reading at a third grade level. Where are you going to go in the world like that? Nowhere. They are lashing out to get respect in a world where there is no respect to be had.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder is not an apt analogy - there is no post. It does not end.
Afaf, her son was murdered: “I see everything through this tragedy.” Survivors disappear into themselves, living lives of solitude & loneliness. Lack of community is a strong predictor of violence.

School principal who takes the first moments of the day to talk with students. “What is going on with you today?” Belonging.

“I sleep with a gun under my pillow.” Drive for revenge/retribution fuels next violent act. And so on. Violence truly begets violence. Guilt, anger, fear. Havoc on the soul, toll on the spirit. Children exposed to violence draw idyllic scenes to control what they have seen.

90% of Chicago’s murders happen in half of its police districts. There are no refugees, there is no where else to go. These are our neighbors. Image above was found in a neighborhood plagued with violence.

The Neurobiology of Violence
Darren Gitelman, MD

My story always begins with my patient’s story. Jerimiah was shot drinking from a garden hose.

Complex problems should be solved with stories, the creation of a shared narrative.

The brain is influenced by neglect, aggression, and pain. Head trauma injures frontal & temporal lobes. Childhood maltreatment leads to delays in cognitive development. Neglect reduces metabolism.

Maya Angelou: “History cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, it can be not lived again.”

Tod Lending’s Legacy
Gary Slutkin, Cease Fire

Science of Behavior - how to change
Science of Epidemics - how things spread

Violence as a public health crisis. Punishment stops nothing. Why is there a lack of demand for results on this? What makes us feel better about a problem is not necessarily what works.

Three ways to fix this problem with a public health perspective:
1. Interrupt transmission - violence interruptors show up and “talk down” those who what retribution. Violence interruptors are people with credibility in the community served.

2. Work with those at highest risk of transmission - change their thinking about how to save face, create new options beside killing.

3. Change the overall behavioral norms - Example: smoking was once considered okay. Now it is taboo. Violence can be thought of in much the same way.

Broken Systems, a panel discussion

Susan Avila, Stroger Hospital
Michelle Gittler, Schwab Rehab Hospital
Marie Crandall, Northwestern Dept. of Surgery & Preventative Medicine

There are disparities in trauma service. There has always been violence. Spikes in violence are linked to population and poverty. Trauma discriminates. There are trauma service deserts in Chicago. Transport time can vary greatly from one neighborhood to another, simply because of geography, not first responder time. Trauma is a teaching moment, a moment of clarity. Trauma patients have poor follow-up rates.

Why Haven’t We Fixed This Yet? A Panel Discussion

Nathaniel Howard: MAD DADS “If men stand up, boys will stand down.”
Sokoni Karanja: New Horizons “We must create believers that change is possible.”
Susan Johnson: Minister, “We didn’t have a story until the media told us what it was.”
Zale Haddenback, Violence Interruptor, Cease Fire: “I have a PhD in gangology.”

In The Wild

2009-09-23T16:26:00.004-05:00

I am blatantly stealing this idea from Brian Fies' blog. He has been asking people to send in photos of his book in bookstores.

Here's the first one I've found of my book, at The Book Cellar here in Chicago. I spoke to the publisher today and he said it is selling quite well, and may be heading into a second edition. If Chicago gets the Olympic bid, a new, updated edition would be in order for the events of 2016. Great news.

Please submit a photo if you find the book anywhere!

Health Reform is Meal Reform Part Two

2009-09-20T17:30:00.003-05:00

Now posted here. AND... tomorrow Michael Pollan is speaking at the Botanic Gardens north of Chicago. If I can get the nerve together, I plan to give him a copy of the comic.

Sit Stay Read Dog of the Year

2009-09-09T09:49:00.016-05:00

The bidding was quite heated at last February's "Best in Show" Event benefiting Sit Stay Read, the literacy organization taking dogs into Chicago's public schools to help kids learn to read. In the end, the winners were Bonnie and Bob, proud parents of Rocky. Rocky and Bonnie are two of Sit Stay Read's longest serving volunteers. This is the very-pleased Bonnie (right) with Sit Stay Read's Executive Director, MaryEllen.

Bob, Bonnie, Rocky, his sister Margie, and I had a wonderful walk in the park in July so I could get some photos of Rocky doing his second-favorite activity, next to visiting schools with Sit Stay Read, which is lounging in the park. I got some great photos of Rocky from which to begin my commission.

And now it is finished - just in time to be used in the back-to-school programs Sit Stay Read will be starting up all over the city soon. This is the version that the kids will see on their book pages, the version they can color. Our older kids all know Rocky, so having him appear on their pages will be a fun surprise.

This is the computer-colored version. We can use this one for all kinds of fun Sit Stay Read fun.

And this is the watercolored original that will be framed for Bonnie & Bob. I put some extra detail into the background trees.

Next up: Rocky's sister Margie deserves her own commission!

Capitol Words

2009-08-31T17:22:00.003-05:00

Via @pourmecoffee on Twitter, check out this interesting site, Capitol Words. Like Wordle, it removes common words and makes a word cloud of the adjectives, verbs, and nouns most used in a particular body of text. Unlike Wordle, it is dynamic. On Capitol Words, you can chose the timeframe and create a word cloud for Congress' and your individual federal lawmaker's most frequently uttered words. Very cool.

I used a word-frequency analysis in my thesis, and I know my committee did not consider it very scholarly. It may indeed not be very scholarly, but I do believe word frequency analysis is compelling and ultimately meaningful, especially in this context.

Obsessed with Food

2009-08-31T15:22:00.008-05:00

Much to the dismay of anyone who has tried to spend time with me lately, this summer I've been obsessed with Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. Also of great interest has been the recent food-related work of David Kessler, in The End of Overeating.

Here is the first installment of a comic based on that obsession.

A few things differentiate this comic from others. The most obvious difference is that I used watercolors rather than digital colors. I've been experimenting with style improvements, and this one may or may not qualify. Feel free to comment. At very least, it's an attempt to emulate the work of two of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists, Roz Chast and Sempe.

And just to show you that though I've babbled about Pollan & Kessler's work on how what we're eating is killing us, and I have tried to live up to what I'm reading, I do approach this enterprise with the same sense of irony I embody in the comic. Here is me at the Berrien County Youth Fair with three elephant ears. It was real scientific research, to see if Kessler is right in his contention that our brains have been hijacked and rewired to crave any combination of sugar, salt, fat.

Just for the record, I only ate half of one. And yes, Kessler is right. Sitting there waiting for friends to return from watching a calf emerge from its mother in the "Wonders of Birth Barn" several people offered me three times what I paid for those elephant ears. In addition, I offer this image as a second piece of evidence:

Hope you enjoy the comic. And please do feel free to weigh in on any of this. (See what I did there?)

Night Sky, Viroqua, WI

2009-08-27T17:00:00.001-05:00

GalaxyPortal, originally uploaded by Doc macaSTAT.

Sound of Music | Central Station Antwerp (Belgium)

2009-08-19T16:26:00.001-05:00

The Obama Treatment?

2009-08-17T21:35:00.003-05:00

President Obama seems to be dropping the option of providing insurance to all as part of health care reform. This is unfortunate for many reasons. One very immediate and problematic reason that all of us should be insured is that our country's emergency rooms are crowded with primary care patients who can't afford to go to a doctor's office. An emergency room can't turn patients with no money away, a doctor's office can.

Another reason it's unfortunate that President Obama is abandoning something he hoped to achieve during his Presidency is strategic. What else is he going to sacrifice to political wrangling? And what kind of precedent is set? If the opposition puts up a big enough fight, the goal is abandoned?

Obama needs to take a lesson from Lyndon Johnson. I know, I know, Johnson is not remembered fondly due to his dogged insistence that we could win in Vietnam, and all the destruction and loss of life that produced. Fair enough.

But the shadow side of that insane determination was that Johnson was incredibly successful with Congress. When it came to passing legislation that he felt passionately about, such as Medicare and Medicaid, the original health care reform legislation, Johnson knew how to get legislation passed without sacrificing important features.

How did he do this? It was known as The Johnson Treatment. According to historian and Johnson biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin (via the Daily Beast)

[Johnson] often said that Congress had to be with you on the takeoff so they'd be with you on the landing. That philosophy Obama followed in giving Congress a leadership role in drafting the health care bill. After the debacle of the Clinton administration's secret task force it made double sense. And add to that the understanding that Democrats on the Hill have been waiting for years for their moment in the sun.

LBJ also understood that the president was the ultimate weapon and thus had to be held in reserve until the moment was right, but this is the critical moment we are at today. This is the moment, LBJ would suggest, when the president has to take charge, to draw lines, to pressure, to threaten, to cajole, to exert every resource of leadership he has—to put pressure on wavering Democrats to make it clear that losing health care will be a huge blow not only to him but to all Democrats who were brought into office on the promise of big change, and particularly on health care.

LBJ used to have big charts where he could know which congressman or senator he needed to call at every instant. He would then invite them to breakfast, cocktails, call them at any hour of the day or night. He called one senator at 3 a.m. and said to the senator, 'I hope I didn't wake you up,' and the senator replied, 'Oh no, I was just lying here hoping my president would call.' So this is the moment for Obama to mobilize his troops in the field, to play hard ball, to do whatever it takes to get a bill passed. LBJ once said it was fine if final votes were razor thin, even with big majorities in the Congress, for that meant he had secured the maximum provisions he wanted, rather than compromising too early and too much.

Here's what that looked like in person. I think Obama could pull it off.

Moments via Radiolab

2009-08-16T17:34:00.002-05:00

All week, one of my favorite audio shows, Radiolab out of WNYC in New York has been posting audio vignettes about the moment of death, following up on their recent episode on this topic. They have been like daily gifts, and today's is the big present, like the bike that was hidden at the neighbor's house on Christmas, the one you never saw coming and you can't believe how incredible it is. Don't miss this.

Random Piece of Art #5

2009-08-10T10:39:00.004-05:00

(Click image to enlarge)

I did this sort-of cartoon a few years ago, when thinking about Louis Sullivan. The text of the cartoon (minus my commentary) appears on the back side of his gravestone in Graceland Cemetery. Sullivan's story has always been fascinating to me. He was a guy who was clearly brilliant and talented, but also troubled, angry, bitter. He died alone and penniless despite all of his fame and accomplishments. Astonishing tombs he designed enshrine his clients in Graceland, yet his own grave there had no marker until years after his death. Despite the gorgeous detail and delicacy of his work, must have been a real pain in the ass.

New Favorite Website

2009-08-06T11:15:00.002-05:00

Cute Overload. Check it daily. It makes life just a touch easier.

Summer Goodness

2009-08-02T10:41:00.004-05:00

Here it is, in a box from the produce market: snapdragons and assorted flowers, sweet corn, blueberries, peaches, plums, cherries, red lettuce. Life is good.

Oh, and this too.

Health Reform is Meal Reform

2009-07-18T08:32:00.004-05:00

Listening to the debates about reforming health care just after reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. What seems to be the elephant in the room, missing completely from the current health care debate, is any talk of how we are getting sick in the first place. According to Pollan, it's what we eat. Two-thirds of medical expenses can be directly linked to what we eat and drink. From the description of his book on his website:

Most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

Life Update

2009-07-06T17:45:00.010-05:00

I'll say what you've been thinking, visitors: the blogging has been pretty lame. It's possible the ease of Facebook is to blame. I've found it far too tempting to just post an inarticulate stray thought here and a photo there and fail to sit down to pull together something coherent. (Not that I'm promising coherent.)

But my thesis advisor's complete reworking of her website (on which she features & explains the origins of one of my cartoons) has inspired me to get my cyberspace act together. So here goes.

To make up for ignoring this blog and turning to the oh-so-easy and seductive Facebook (on which you can become a fan!) I am announcing a few news items here exclusively.

1. My new pet. Her name is Sally. Sally Mander. She's actually a green anole, also known as a chameleon. See below for evidence of her color changing talent - in the first photo she is clearly green, in the second, brown. A friend found her in his downtown law office on the windowsill, as unlikely as that sounds. His young daughter, Sally, named her. Our working hypothesis is that Sally Mander came in on a rental plant.

Alice seems to be managing her jealousy just fine.

2. Hospital Art. Thanks to Esther and LBD Fine Art, Several pieces from the Chicago Memories Series will hang in Lutheran General Hospital's new pediatric unit. We also provided pages for the kids to color. As a nurse, this is a special thrill. Next week Esther is going to show me the pieces in situ. I'll be sure to post photos. (Here and Facebook, I promise.) Check out a sample coloring page:

3. My first giant roadsign. A commission in Union Pier, Michigan has produced wonderful results on the Red Arrow Highway. All the best to Nessa in her new business venture. If you're in the area, stop in and tell her how much you like the sign. And buy a sandwich or something.

4. The thesis. I didn't talk too much about graduate school while I was in it (wait, that's right! It's not just Facebook's fault that this blog has been lame!) but it is officially over. For now. I've gotten an MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from Northwestern. Well, I don't officially have the degree. I skipped graduation so I'm waiting for the paper to come in the mail. But I am using the new letters after my name in my email signature.

As my thesis, I conducted an oral history of the AIDS unit at Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where I worked as a nurse for six years. Doing an oral history has been such a rewarding process, and the histories I've collected are so compelling, that I'm currently working on turning my thesis into a larger project. Stay tuned for details and updates on where that process takes me. This is the biggest chunk of what I'm working on this summer.

Grad school was really great. I can honestly say that every one of my professors were (and are) incredibly warm, kind, fun, smart, and supportive of my work as an artist.

For example, I was encouraged to present not just one Powerpoint presentation on comics in the the Medical Humanities, but two. And not just about all of the incredible medically-related comics that are out there, like Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer, or Marissa Acocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen, I was encouraged to present my work and my thoughts on how making comics helps me to think through the experience of being a caregiver. I have been so fortunate to study with these great professors: Tod Chambers, Alice Dreger, Catherine Belling, Katie Watson, Kathryn Montgomery and Gretchen Case. Google any of them and you will find the interesting, challenging, multi-disciplinary work for which each of them is very well known.

That's a lot of news, right? I'm trying to make up for lost time and hope to not neglect the blog again. Thanks for continuing to check in here and be well.