Archive Posts

Deirdre Neilen, PhD shares a selection from Upstate’s literary journal, ‘The Healing Muse‘ every Sunday on HealthLink on Air. She edits the annual publication featuring fiction, poetry, essays and visual art focused on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing.

Order copies of ‘The Healing Muse’ through the Center for Bioethics & Humanities.

Snow, by Katharyn Howd Machan

falls outside my safe brown home
and I am weeping, I am crying:
this house holds two black-striped cats
but God is a distant palace of whim

allowing my daughter to long for a drug
that turns her into thin gray smoke,
vague lips that lie for survival.
Crystals? They’re blowing now

swift and silver and silent as hope
only a mother can ask to find
when the body she’s birthed and loves
finds heroin is more important

than giving to the wider world
calling out her name. Snow
beautiful and bright and pure
pours down from a streetlit night

here where I dare write a poem
praying that the girl I bore
is able to look out through a window
and wonder at winter sky.

Things My Daughter Lost in Hospitals, by Toni L. Wilkes

One million twenty-seven strands of hair.
A smooth scalp. Several inches of frontal bone.

A Tiffany bracelet. Thirty-nine liters of urine.
The call button. Her patience. A pear-shaped

Gallbladder. Her husband’s patience. Eight pints
of blood. Numerous stainless steel staples.

Her job. One decaliter of cerebral spinal fluid.
Two blue and white hospital gowns. Her pink

sweater. The ability to have more children.
Twenty-two pieces of Big Red chewing gum.

Forty-one days of consciousness. Names
of night nurses. Names of day nurses. Six

Actiq lollypops. Seven neurosurgeons.
Two hundred eighteen sutures. Her daughter’s

sixth birthday. The desire for sex. Three yellow
bedpans. Her blood-brain barrier. Five years.

Fourth year Upstate psychiatry resident Seetha Ramanathan is the co-author of a research study that analyzed data on U.S. teens born during the early 1980s.  Her research found slightly higher rates of adolescent delinquent behaviors in this group, such as smoking, drinking, arrests and thefts, that might possibly be tied to macroeconomic conditions during the first year of life.  

Read the stories:
Babies born during recessions grow up more likely to have drug problems and become involved in crime according to new study
Are recession babies prone to be delinquent teens?

Upstate’s ‘Pathway to Wellness’ coordinator Suzanne Brisk shares some strategies for keeping those New Year’s resolutions – from setting small realistic goals to making a plan to succeed. 

Michele Caliva, administrative director of the Upstate New York Poison Center at Upstate Medical University, talks about prescription drug abuse, and the growing abuse of these drugs by teenagers.

In the event of an unintentional poison exposure, call 1-800-222-1222 .