this message was attached to my teabag. i snapped a pic of it in Jan 2022 when the whole world was raging with COVID and hospitals were overflowing again. just when I felt like I was starting to drown in repeat pandemic madness, my teabag helped ground me. 🙂
Today is Match Day! All across the United States, fourth-year medical students find out where they will be going for their residency training. It’s intense. It’s exciting. I’ve always said that Match Day is filled with the entire spectrum of raw human emotion. Kudos to the med students this year and last year that had… Continue reading Match Day 2022
No one in my family had any sort of haircut in the first year of the pandemic. We finally found a family friend we could hire to come to our house and do haircuts outside even in chilly and breezy weather. Thank goodness for her! She was a trooper. Here are a mini comb and… Continue reading Hair care
I pulled the push-pin out of the plaster wall in my office and took down my 2020 multi-faith calendar. As part reflection, part act of aggression, I cut it apart. How could I collage these images, shapes and numbers to represent my own experience? I work on the Covid ICU at the University of Utah… Continue reading 2020 Multi-Faith Calendar Collage
Prayer is a common intervention to relieve stress and help patients cope during times of crisis and difficulty (Simão, T. P., Caldeira, S., & De Carvalho, E. C. (2016). For some, this act is personal and private, while others find solace in collective prayer. This is particularly true for families of patients, who frequently gather… Continue reading Praying by Zoom
I drew PPE Person as a playful mascot during Covid. Occasionally PPE Person, covered in a blue gown and PAPR (protective hood), would accompany an email with a bit of arts-based inspiration for colleagues, such as a poem, video clip, or song.
These papers were donated together in the Project Art Heals Utah dropbox. Two slips of paper speak volumes about our shared and individual pandemic journeys. Every COVID number represents a human life, with a real hopes, aspirations, dreams, and defeats.
My grandfather, Marvin Stewart, passed away on June 20, 2020. I honor both his strength and his perseverance through the pain of a long illness. He did so with grace, and with his usual humor that was full of sarcasm and (very) dry wit. I miss him every day. My physical memento, a wooden tractor… Continue reading For Marvin
The kids love seeing the dinosaur fossils at the U’s Natural History Museum. Once COVID hit, we stopped going. It seems like a trivial loss, but it was our go-to family activity. How strange to feel scared of going to a museum. Fortunately, we made some trips to the desert and got to see real… Continue reading Dinosaur
In March 2020, I had been a widow for less than 2 years. LBL and I had been together for almost 30 years. I was living alone and finally starting to get into a daily routine of life without my late husband LBL. Global lockdown hit and it was lonely. Trying to keep my sense… Continue reading March 2020: missing my late husband during lockdown
