Compassionate Care
Posted on February 22, 2006
Filed Under personal | Comments
First off I want to thank everyone that read, linked to, blogged about, referenced, etc. my first post. Extremely gratifying and encouraging, and definitely left me feeling that blogging is going to be something I enjoy. Your comments and feedback are much appreciated, even as I need to learn how (and at what level) I’m going to be able to react and respond directly.
At the risk of losing my freshly-minted audience, I want to blog today about something that is neither technology nor business-related.
Krista (my girlfriend of nearly 5 years) serves as the Volunteer Coordinator at the Charlotte Maxwell Complementary Clinic. This clinic offers complementary alternative medicine treatments to low-income women with cancer. Their services seek to provide relief from the “terrible side-effects of cancer and its treatments”. Today the San Francisco Chronicle featured the clinic in a very touching article.
Ways that you can help:
- Ask your organization to become a corporate sponsor, and have them contact Linda.
- Direct any practitioners (massage therapists, herbalists, acupuncturists, etc.) who might be interested in volunteering to the Clinic
- Make a donation yourself
- If you know someone who is a low-income woman with cancer, please share information about the Clinic and its services with her.
I’ve often said that I aspire toward balance in my life, but to observe that balance one would need to integrate over large chunks of time and experience… Krista and I are in very different lines of work, and again here the word “complementary” comes to mind. I feel privileged to have a partner whose work is so directly and obviously connected to alleviating suffering in the world. Krista has taught me so much about the politics of cancer, poverty, and how to truly and deeply care for people. I’m inspired by her example daily.
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3 Responses to “Compassionate Care”
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Brad, it’s great you are supporting her with this. I do clinical research informatics work at a tertiary care center in the Great Lakes region and see the kind of people she is supporting when I walk the halls there. Great medical care may play a role in keeping them alive and getting them better, but the knowledge that someone cares does too, perhaps just as much or more so. In any case this knowledge makes the hell they are going through a little more bearable. Please tell Krista, keep up the good work…
Content 2.0, London (06.06.06) - I’ll be there……
I interrupt my usual provisioning of blog fodder to let you know I’m going to be in London to……
I’m a regular at Apophenia, and saw the post about you being her boss. (I dig her blog posts, btw).
I’m a librarian, a medical librarian, to be exact. I know about the importance of hope for women who have cancer. Sometimes hope is about being informed.
See my post on evidence-based complementary medicine (it might be useful for your other half) :
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/archives/023114.html
Dean Giustini, UBC Google scholar blogger