Hi All,
Happy Summer! Even though I no longer live my life according to a school schedule, I still get a feeling of Ah, summer these days. It’s the breeze blowing in through open windows, the sweet lusciousness of strawberries from our CSA farm share, an extra bit of shine to the sunlight. I plan to enjoy that feeling of living being easy and hope you can, too. For readers who are working clinically, that may be an impossible challenge and my heart goes out to you. Read on
New column in The American Journal of Nursing
My June “What I’m Reading” column in AJN discusses the book Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead. The title might sound like an approach I wouldn’t like, but it’s actually a smart and timely idea: that patients can only be well-cared for if staff are. We face epidemic levels of burnout among health care staff because the system chewed people up and spit them out during the pandemic. Restoring our clinicians will require caring for them. Read the column here.
Harvard Medical School virtual event
What better way to enjoy summer than to attend a virtual event for the Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School on the evening of June 23. We will discuss my new book Healing and the value of the humanities to health care—a topic very dear to my heart, though I haven’t talked much about it so far. Register via this link. A reminder that if you order Healing through my local indie bookstore, City of Asylum Books, they will ship a signed copy to you.
The New York Times “Summer Reading” list
I was so excited to have the NYT review of Healing including in this past Sunday’s “Book Review” section. If you didn’t read the review when it came out online, find it here. I had some reservations about this review when it was first published, but it captures a key way that Healing differs from many other illness memoirs—that I get very angry when I don’t feel cared for as a patient. That anger continues, too. Just today I had to make a couple of doctor’s appointments and the scheduling process was Kafkaesque. There is a better way.
The “Healing Newsletter” matures
Newsletters are all the rage now, and while I started this newsletter as a way to get the word out about my writing, I’ve decided to make it more than that. Thus, I will be adding biweekly posts that discuss making health care more compassionate and read like Opinion columns. Some weeks instead of a column I will have an interview with a health care leader. The chatty here’s-what-I’m-up-to newsletters will continue, but on alternate weeks. We’ll see how it goes. I think people are hungry for this kind of thinking and I hope to provide some comfort, useful ire, and food for thought about making change. Stay tuned….
I continue to do publicity events for Healing, but at a slower pace than when the book first came out. As a result, I have more time to swim, read, catch up with friends, and travel. We will visit our son Conrad in Michigan at the end of June and I will also do a book event in Ann Arbor, MI. Details here. At the start of July I fly to Edinburgh to hang out for a week with our daughter Sophia, who will have finished geology camp at St. Andrews University in Scotland. As I said at the start of this newsletter—it feels like Summer.
Hugs to all,
Theresa
I am so excited that your newsletter is going to feature essays! Congratulations on making the NYTimes summer reading list, and enjoy your time with Conrad!