Hidden in Plain Sight: Dying and Homelessness

November 30th, 2010 | Category: Feature, News From The Fourth World | One comment

This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death, Gunpowder on the streets, and Will losing your home kill you?

In every training program, nationwide, they are the cases you don’t easily forget, the [...]

Will Losing Your Home Kill You?

November 23rd, 2010 | Category: News From The Fourth World | One comment

This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death, and Gunpowder on the streets.

Meet Mike*

If you work in a homeless clinic, every so often you’re going to see a Mike. He’s easy [...]

Saving Your Health When You’re Losing Your Home

November 23rd, 2010 | Category: Feature, Practical Medicine | 4 comments

Image via Wikipedia

Studies show that many people faced with home loss and housing uncertainty can take a tremendous hit to their health. If you’re going through difficult times, and worried you too may lose your home, what can you do to try to buffer or reclaim your health?

Here are some tips for [...]

Part 2: Gunpowder on the street

November 19th, 2010 | Category: In the News | One comment

In tandem, both ambulance, and fire truck, red lights strobed across the narrow cave-like doorway to the Tom Waddell clinic. The images flashed in the dark, like red-tinted, stop-motion animation. Inside the narrow space the six of us from needle exchange creaked zombie-like to our feet from where we’d been bent over bodies. Two men [...]

Looking for death on the streets. And finding it.

November 16th, 2010 | Category: News From The Fourth World | Leave a comment

I went to needle exchange to hang out. You may be asking yourself what a soccer mom from the burbs is doing perched on a folding chair in the parking garage of 101 Grove on a dark November night, surrounded by syringes. I was there as a guest observer because I’m working on a series [...]

Haiti storms, cholera and you: Time to thank your toilet

November 4th, 2010 | Category: Feature, In the News | 22 comments

I have a new best friend. She’s cool and smooth and adaptable. Kind of like a Dragon-Tattooed-urbanite who can deal with any situation, from a tweaking guest at a rave, to the post-modern gut-angst of intellectuals. She’s slow to rile too – give her a nudge and all she does is gurgle at you.

She’s [...]