To choose nursing or medicine as a profession comes with the reality that, at some points in your career, you will likely be covering weekends and holidays. So when my children were young, I had to take my turns doing shifts on Thanksgiving and Christmas for many...
Oh my. The holidays. The responsibilities. The drama. The pressure. It can make a sane person crazy and a sober person relapse. There are so many things out there on social media about self-care, but as a Family Practice Nurse Practitioner with an additional specialty...
There is so much support out there for people committed to their sobriety, especially during the holidays. The added stressors of gifts, events, parties, and relatives can intensify urges and vaporize a resolve in the afternoon that was solid in the morning. Many...
Christmas music is now playing in stores and on the radio and you are newly sober. Congratulations! This is an incredibly vulnerable time for a newly recovered person. Even the music can be a trigger. Recovery is a process and will be tested many times over the years....
When I started working at the Coleman Institute for Addiction Medicine many years ago, I was blown away by the parents who were shell-shocked to learn that their children—their high achieving, athletic, award-winning, popular, beloved children—were addicted to heroin....