Our Story Begins (Yours Is Next)

“Go play in traffic, kid.”  It’s doubtful that my mother could have imagined in shooing away one of her seven children that the traffic in question would be at McElderry and North Wolfe streets in East Baltimore, with a rescue chopper hovering loudly above, on my way to work at an institution she could scarcely have imagined either: the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.

Don’t get me wrong. Mom was a proud, well-educated RN who favored the emergency room settings where a kid playing in traffic might just end up. (She was mostly kidding about that, I think.) She attended St. Joseph School of Nursing in Rhode Island and cut her teeth in the psychiatric wards and sought sanity in the chapel of the spookiest cluster of prison and hospital buildings that Cranston, R.I., had to offer. The notion that part of the complex now houses the hippest set of shops and condos in Cranston would have made her cackle.

But this place…

I wish she were here to see where I’ve landed as editorial strategist for the School of Nursing. She didn’t get my career as a journalist–an editor who never got his name on top of anything he wrote. She also, alas, didn’t get the idea of a pledge to look after herself as she would a patient, and left this circle of caring far too soon. Her memory is in no small part what drove me here, in fact, to tell the stories and promote the work of the real folks fighting, sweating, and studying to change the world and save the lives of people who won’t even be born for another 100 years.

We are here. I’m happy to be. You’re happy to be. Let’s tell the world now and again just why that is. And how other great minds can become part of all this … wow.

This means you. Tell us a story, and we’ll share it with the rest of the class. And don’t worry if you’re not usually much of a “sharer”: You’ll make us look smart … uh, I mean we’ll make YOU look smart. Heck, you are the best and the brightest. So that part is taken care of. And maybe this can be the start of your own individual blog at the School of Nursing or wherever. The new dean’s on board! The more voices in the choir, the better.

OK, start singing.

Contact me at sstange2@jhu.edu or call 410-614-5317.

-Steve St. Angelo