“It’s not just a vote. This is my life,” Stacey Vasquez on DADT Vote in the Senate

Stacey Vasquez was discharged by the military for violating the ‘”don’t ask, don’t tell” law and hopes to re-enlist if this vote gets repealed over the weekend.  Gay rights activists, congressional aides and supportive lawmakers are anticipating a successful vote this weekend to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law. A Washington Post slide show captures the history of this law starting 17 years ago when it was enacted to the Senate vote this weekend to repeal it.

In September 2010, a federal judge in California, Virginia A. Phillips, ruled that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law violates the equal protection and First Amendment rights of service members. The latest Pentagon study on the impact of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” showed that most service members wouldn’t care if they had to live and work alongside openly gay and lesbian peers and finds overturning DADT would not cause any long term problems for the American military.

DADT is a human rights issue and concerns the health of individuals, families and communities. In this article by Kenneth A. Katz, MD, “The Health Hazards of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: A View from the Clinic” published this month in RH Reality Check he reports how “the military’s policy on homosexuality imperils the health of service members, the military, and the country, and it advocates for repeal of the policy on those grounds.”  Dr. Katz also published an article on this issue in this month’s New England Journal of Medicine.

As the Senate gets closer to a possible “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” vote, Lady Gaga is doing her part. Artist Lady Gaga spoke at a rally in support of repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in Portland, Maine, in September to pressure the two moderate Republican senators there, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, to support the military’s repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy for gays in the armed services. In late November she released a video asking her fans to call their senators to support the repeal with special directions on how to be most effective in doing so.  Close to 3 million viewers have watched it.

This comment was posted on YouTube page with her “A message from Lady Gaga to the Senate September 16, 2010”

“They said black soldiers would hurt morale. Then they said female soldiers would hurt morale. Now gay soldiers hurt morale.

Here’s a thought: Maybe war hurts morale. Does it matter what the race, gender or sexuality of the soldier was if he/she comes home in a box?”

It takes every voice to bring about change – thanks everyone who does this everyday to create a just and civil society. Let’s hope the Senate acts to repeal DADT.

Barbara Glickstein, RN, MPH, MS is co-director of The Center for Health, Media and Policy

[caption id="attachment_10597" align="alignleft" width="300"] Lady Gaga, center,

Health, Media, Policy…and Poetry, Part 2

Senior Fellow Joy Jacobson, MFA, is a health care journalist, a medical editor, and a poet.

This week’s edition of Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, a radio broadcast produced by Public Radio International and WNYC, highlights the connection between art and medicine, which I explored in my last blog post. Andersen attempts to find answers to an important question: how do we know whether the arts are effective in improving health care and patient outcomes?

Among the fascinating segments was an interview with Jill Sonke, director of the Center for the Arts in Healthcare at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Sonke discusses research that has shown that the use of the arts, such as music therapy, in hospitals can reduce costs and improve outcomes. Listen for her discussion of how she answers the question, “Where’s the science?”

A good example of a well-established program is Arts in Medicine at Shands Hospital, also at the University of Florida, where musicians, writers, dancers, and visual artists work with patients, visitors, and clinicians. The aim of the literary program is simply stated: “By sharing words, community is created,” and therefore “no one is left alone in challenging terrain.”

In continuing to look at these connections, I asked three poets who are nurses what poems matter to them and to tell us: How might a single work of art illuminate some aspect of health or health care.

Karen Roush, MSN, FNP, RN, is a poet, doctoral student in nursing, and founder of The Scholar’s Voice, through which she instructs nurses in writing for publication. Karen chose “Tulips,” by Sylvia Plath, a poem published posthumously in the now-classic collection Ariel. Says Karen:

“Tulips” captures so perfectly the experience of being a patient and does it in the beautiful and intense language Plath was so gifted at. The loss of personhood (“I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses”), the disconnection from life that illness and pain can necessitate (“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty”), and the sometimes unsettling (“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me”) pull back to the world, calling “from a country as far away as health.” That last phrase alone is a masterpiece; it returns to me whenever, as patient, family member, or nurse, I find myself outside the borders of that “country.”

Madeleine Mysko, MA, RN, is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and nurse. She chose “Apologies to My OB-GYN,”a poem by Rebecca Foust first published in the literary journal Margie and included in Dark Card, Foust’s 2007 collection of poems dealing with her son’s Asperger’s syndrome. Madeleine says,

I admire the rhetorical formality of this poem—a sarcastic apology on the surface, a flash of anger back over time toward the time-stressed obstetrician and the entire, impersonal health care system with its “cost-benefit analyses.” The flippancy in “Sorry” (as opposed to “I’m sorry”) gains power as it is repeated down the stanzas, until the final stanza, when the mother/speaker provides a glimpse of the child now, years later and beyond the view of the neonatal ICU. The leap across the white space from “Sorry he took so much of your time” to “being so determined to live” is like a mask falling away, a powerful moment of dramatic irony.

Veneta Masson, MA, RN, is a primary care nurse and the author of the poetry collections Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill and Clinician’s Guide to the Soul, among other books. She chose William Stafford’s “The Way It Is.” Here it is in its entirety, reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press from Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Veneta says:

“Many years ago, at the beginning of my nursing career, a poem of William Stafford’s jumped off the page at me and changed my whole perspective on patient care. It’s a short poem called “Strokes” that begins, “The left half of her world is gone…”

Now, over 40 years later, I’m learning another Stafford poem by heart. I don’t know how it found me, but I’m grateful. “The Way It Is” describes the metaphorical thread we follow through life. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. While we hold it, we can’t get lost. In sickness and in health, at work and at home, we all need to be reminded about the thread. I look at mine as it continues to spool out and I marvel.

The poem ends with a caution, “You don’t ever let go of the thread.” I don’t intend to.

[caption id="attachment_10599" align="alignleft" width="300"] Danielle DeCosmo, an

Season 10’s “Biggest Loser” Finale: The Fix and The Fixers (Part Two of Two)

Read Part One of this post here:

Wait a minute.

People who are overweight and/or obese have a problem controlling how much they eat. That’s bad for their health.

However, the inability to exercise complete, rational control over your behavior at all times is the hallmark of being a living, sentient, human being.

Fat people are not more damaged than other people. They’re not less stable.

Fat people are just really, really unlucky. Everyone has issues, imperfections, foibles, big and small. Heavy people wear a personal shortcoming externally, for anyone to see and judge. And pay them less.

Lisa didn’t become a better mom when she became a thinner mom. The fact that Lisa was not able to stop overeating, and even her admission that, as a working, single mom she frequently fed her kids cheap, take-out, fatty pizza (shocking!) doesn’t mean that she ever failed to meet their emotional or material needs.

Weight is not a moral or character issue. It’s a health issue. But the Biggest Loser is relentless in characterizing contestants as initially weak, childlike, and even, in trainer Bob’s words, “broken” people.

Read Part One of this post here:

Wait a minute.

People who are overweight and/or obese have a problem controlling how much they eat. That’s bad for their health.

However, the inability to exercise complete, rational control over your behavior at all times is the hallmark of being a living, sentient, human being.

Fat people are not more damaged than other people. They’re not less stable.

Fat people are just really, really unlucky. Everyone has issues, imperfections, foibles, big and small. Heavy people wear a personal shortcoming externally, for anyone to see and judge. And pay them less.

Lisa didn’t become a better mom when she became a thinner mom. The fact that Lisa was not able to stop overeating, and even her admission that, as a working, single mom she frequently fed her kids cheap, take-out, fatty pizza (shocking!) doesn’t mean that she ever failed to meet their emotional or material needs.

Weight is not a moral or character issue. It’s a health issue. But the Biggest Loser is relentless in characterizing contestants as initially weak, childlike, and even, in trainer Bob’s words, “broken” people.