I was interviewed recently for a podcast talking about Connecticut’s SWORD opioid overdose reporting program.  Check it out here:  

In my Anti-Black racism course I an taking at UCONN, I learned about two famous Americans who I had never heard of before.  Colonel Tye and Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mum Bett.  They both lived during the American Revolutionary War. Colonel Tye was a New Jersey slave known as Titus.  He was owned by […]

Years ago, I did all of my writing at a desk in a lonely room. I would write on yellow legal pads and then when I had something, I would type it out on my portable smith corona. When my daughter was little, I showed her my old typewriter and she was fascinated with it. […]

Our hospital has banned bandanas, gaiters and masks with exhalation valves from their universal masking requirements.    This includes all visitors to the hospital, who will be given a surgical mask on entry if their mask does not meet the new requirements.  Additionally staff can only wear homemade masks if they are covering surgical masks. […]

My old boss, former United States Senator and later Governor of Connecticut, Lowell Weicker used to say, the mark of a great country is not how it treats its richest citizens, but how it treats its most vulnerable.  Yesterday, we witnessed President Donald Trump emerge from Walter Reed Hospital, chopper on Marine One back to […]

Enrolled in Anti-Black Racism — a college course at UConn.  As an employee at the UConn Health Center, the one credit class is free to me.  It is all online. The first assignment was watching this video. Here are the lyrics: You should’ve been downtown (word) The people are risin’ (for real?)  We thought it […]

Wayne Cabral died a couple days ago after a brief illness.  Wayne stopped working for us a number of years ago when he went to work as a paramedic for one of the area towns.  I worked with a few times when he was an EMT over twenty years ago before he became a paramedic […]

I just finished reading The End of October: a Novel  by Lawrence Wright.  This book had incredible timing as it is a thriller about a pandemic that hit the bookstores in April just as COVID was becoming a household world and fear.  The virus in this book is COVID on steroids and the story is […]

Peter Nicholas, a writer for The Atlantic, who covers the White House, wrote an article on August 27, 2020, called “White House, Petri Dish.”  In the article, he referred to the White House’s West Wing where the President and his top advisor’s have their offices as “a corona virus breeding ground.” White House, Petri Dish […]

In the next to last draft of my new book, Killing Season: A Paramedic’s Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic, I quoted a former user, as saying “heroin withdrawal is so painful, it hurts to even blink.”  She further said, “Withdrawal is so bad, I wouldn’t even wish it on Donald Trump.”  […]