Author Archives: bethpow06
FMM 5 8 2020 Doing the Right Thing
“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi. I left home at the age of eighteen and a half, finished with high school, ready to enter the profession of nursing. The weird thing about growing up in a small […]
FMM 5 1 2020 The Evolution will not be Televised
“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.” ~ C. L. Stuart. When I was about seventeen, I was itching to learn to drive. This was in Jamaica, back in the days when stick shifts were standard, automatics were rare. I was the youngest child, and only one still at […]
FMM 4 24 2020 The Ties that Bond
“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” ~ Epictetus. We are living through an amazing time. There are eras in your life that are special. When I started in nursing school in England in the 70s, I knew absolutely […]
FMM 4 17 2020 Like a Rock
“Sometimes you can find peace of mind by transferring yourself to different situations. They’re just reminders to stay… calm.” ~ Yves Behar. My father always claimed to be a late developer, not in the physical sense, but in the academic sense. He did not do well in his ‘common entrance’ an exam given to 11 […]
FMM 4 10 2020 A Social Conundrum
“There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness.” ~ Maggie Smith. My father was an eclectic music lover. Brought up in a Welsh chapel, he had an abiding love of hymns, especially as he grew up to be a minister of religion. In his collection of LPs (long-playing records, from the olden days!), and then later […]
FMM 4 3 2020 Challenge!
“Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. My father and my father-in-law were two very different men. My father descended from the mountain people of Wales, my father-in-law from the tribes of Africa. My father, although the son of a truck-driver was […]
FMM 3 27 2020 No Time for Platitudes
“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” ~ Albert Camus. This week I saw a headline that said that New York women were going to have to give birth alone. It was not as stark as it sounded. It wasn’t that the poor women were going to have to squat […]
FMM 3 20 2020 These Bipolar Times
“I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh. One of the amazing things about the human body (and there are many) is its ability to develop immunity, over time. We have these cells who, pacman-like, chomp up invaders and then display pieces of them […]
FMM 3 13 20 Virus Ignoramus
“Vows made in storms are forgotten in calm.” ~ Thomas Fuller. I have one very clear memory of nursing during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. A young man had developed a collapsed lung, which required the insertion of a tube into his chest wall to suck the air out of the pleural space […]
FMM 3 6 2020 Nature’s Reboot
“Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” ~ Malcolm X. My first memory of realizing the awesomeness of nature, the truly astonishing wonder of it all was a view of the night sky from the deck of an ocean liner. I […]
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