VIEW FROM THE BED: VIEW FROM THE BEDSIDE A Wising Up Anthology Editors: Heather Tosteson, Ph.D., Phyllis A. Langton, R.N., Ph.D., Charles D. Brockett, Ph.D. Who is the doctor or nurse who for better, or worse, you can't forget? The patient who changed your life? Thirty-eight contemporary writers explore with memoir, story, and poetry the different ways we talk about, to-and through-each other at the doctor's office, hospital, or sickbed. One surgeon celebrates his first surgical success; another grieves the death of a patient. A nurse finds her compassion exhausted by a suicidal patient;...

Above all, Phyllis Langton's memoir, Last Flight Out: Living, Loving & Leaving, is a passionate love story, one that deepens as she and her husband George Thomas live their way into the experience of ALS, its unremitting losses and its surprising gifts, with dignity, keen humor, a fighter pilot's courage and a nurse's unsentimental pragmatism. "I know what's going to be on my death certificate. That's more than you can say," George tells her after receiving his diagnosis. How they are going to live the time that remains to them as a couple is also not in question, for they are equally...