Top entries from the 13th Annual Celebration of Reflective and Creative Writing (2015):
It’s never easy to deal with sickness and death, but nurses do it every day. In her essay, UVA graduate student Melissa Beth Behl explains how and why she’s able to cope with the stress of caring for patients.
Harriet Vincent has been through many scary situations in her life – as a professional kayaker, navigating white water in competitions around the world, and – more recently – as an emergency department nurse. She still recalls working there one night, during a blizzard, caring for a patient she calls Charles.
Melissa Morgan is a graduate student in nursing at the University of Virginia – a Richmond native who had majored in psychology before choosing to pursue a career in medicine. In one way, she says, nursing is like riding a bike. She discovered that while caring for a 16-year-old cancer patient she calls Ben. He had begun to hallucinate – a response to heavy doses of chemotherapy – when Morgan found her balance.
Poem: The Walls Of Your Room Are Jaundiced
Callie Bateman is from Connecticut, and decided to go into nursing as a sophomore in high school after volunteering at her local hospital. She wrote this poem after working in the neo-natal intensive care unit. She will graduate next year and hopes to practice in Virginia. She has been writing poetry since high school.
Visit here for more information on the entries and the program.
