"The Sacraments of Sister Thecla"
  American Journal of Nursing, May 2011

When I was a nursing student, back in the late '60s, Principles and Practices of Nursing was held in a dim classroom on the first floor of our nurses' residence. There the freshman students would sit in the old, theater-style tiers, intent on the instructions of Sister Thecla.

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Essays by Madeleine Mysko appear in in the Kaplan Voices series: 

"Mr. Bunyan" in Meditations on Hope: Nurses' Stories about Motivation and Inspiration
(For a recent review of the above anthology, click here)

"As My Aunt, the Nurse, Lay Dying" in Final Moments: Nurses' Stories about Death and Dying

"Those ICU Nurses" in Lives in the Balance: Nurses' Stories from the ICU

  


"Education In Isolation"
The Baltimore Sun Commentary, Dec 16, 2007
    
    As I drove through the intersection of Calvert and Pleasant streets the other day, I was thinking of the Mercy Hospital nurses' residence. It's gone now. Or perhaps I should say it has been removed, because that's how I picture it: The old place wasn't torn down at all, but rather plucked up by the hand of a greater power. I have this sense that someday I'll be traveling in another part of the city and there it will be: the old nurses residence, put to good use as low-income housing or a retirement home for nuns.

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"When The Poet Happens To Be A Nurse"
 Rattle Issue #28, Winter 2007
   
    At social functions, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I answer that I'm a nurse, and that I also write poetry. As a rule, the conversation then turns down the path I've taken as poet. Few people ask about the nursing (unless of course they happen to be nurses too). Few are curious about the connection between nursing and poetry.

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The Sister on the Chronic Ward: A Bow to Dignity
American Journal Of Nursing, September 2005  

     I entered my three-month rotation at Seton Psychiatric Institute through a leafy drive, a pastel tunnel of old trees and flowering shrubs.  I was nineteen years old and eager to leave behind my dark and creaky nurses' residence in downtown Baltimore.  So Seton was a welcome escape, with its sloping lawn and the distant, treeless hill where the home for elderly nuns gleamed.
     Even the "chronic ward"--as it was calledi n 1966--had a wholesome, scrubbed charm, not unlike a nursery suite tucked under the eaves of a Victorian mansion.  On the top floor of the hospital, it was a low-ceilinged space, checkered by light from a row of dormer windows.  
                                                                                         
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