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Writing: Op-ed / Citations / Speeches
Editorial writing
It's Cancer, Not a Moral Crucible
writer: Colleen Shaddox
Publication: Washington Post, Editorials page, June 2, 2007
Read the editorial online here
In Teaching Our Kids to Smoke, We’re All Guilty
Writer: Colleen Shaddox (for Yale faculty)
Publication: Hartford Courant, Opinion page, January 25, 2000
Andrew Mason of Norwalk was arrested recently for allegedly allowing his 2-year-old to smoke a cigarette. The natural reaction, of course, is horror.
It is unimaginable that any adult would encourage or even tolerate such harmful behavior in a child. But as we judge Mr. Mason, we would do well to take a long, hard look at ourselves.
As a nation, we have been putting cigarettes into our children’s hands for years. They are paying for our foolishness with their health, and in some cases with their lives.
Adult smoking in the United States is on the decline as tobacco’s tragic consequences have become more widely known. And so the tobacco industry, which we subsidize with our tax dollars, must replace these smokers. They have done it by targeting children.
It’s an eminently sensible strategy. After all, very few reasonable adults would take up a habit whose deadly effects have been so thoroughly documented. The American Lung Association estimates that the industry recruits 1 million new smokers a year — 3,000 a day — and the majority are children and adolescents.
Particularly disturbing is the success that the industry has had in luring teenage girls. A 1997 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 34.7 percent of the girls attending high school smoke.
Many of these girls will still be smokers when they become mothers, thus passing on a legacy of disease to their children during their pregnancies and beyond.
An estimated 9 million to 12 million American children under the age of 5 are exposed in their homes to second-hand smoke -- the mixture of smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, cigar or pipe and that exhaled by smokers.
Lung cancer and heart disease claim the Lives of thousands of non-smokers each year because of second-hand smoke. More immediately, children who breathe in second-hand smoke are more likely to develop asthma and to suffer from it with greater severity.
From 1982 to 1995, the prevalence of pediatric asthma has increased by almost 90 percent in the United States. The state of California has linked second-hand smoke to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Such common problems as ear infections, bronchitis and pneumonia are all linked to second-hand smoke. All are potentially dangerous, and at the very least are unnecessary causes of suffering for our children.
Our home state, Connecticut, will receive $300 million as its portion of the multi-state tobacco settlement, representing the best chance we have ever had, or are ever likely to have, to fund a widespread battle against tobacco addiction and its deadly consequences.
But that money we had hoped would go toward prevention and smoking cessation programs went largely for various non-health programs, such as property tax relief.
The three leading causes of death in Connecticut -- heart disease, cancer and stroke -- all share tobacco as a risk factor. This makes the prevalence of smoking among Connecticut youth particularly disturbing. Our kids start smoking at an average age of 11, younger than anywhere else in the nation.
By high school, 35 percent of Connecticut’s children are smokers. At the risk of sounding dramatic, our use of the tobacco settlement accounted to stealing from our children.
But the problem is not Connecticut’s alone. The simple fact is that we as a nation subsidize tobacco routinely, but the funding of prevention is episodic and often a victim of political whim. We take care of Big Tobacco and leave our children to fend for themselves.
As clinicians and researchers specializing in chronic illness, we know all too well the suffering caused by tobacco. We work hard to alleviate that suffering, both for patients and their families. We would rather prevent that suffering. We would rather prevent all the heart attacks, cancers, strokes, birth defects and asthma attacks that can be laid at tobacco’s doorstep.
But before things can get any better, we need to stop handing our kids tobacco. We need to recognize that giving kids cigarettes is a serious crime. And that we’re all guilty.
Citations
Excellence in Caring in Chronic Illness Awards
Writer: Colleen Shaddox
Client: Yale School of Nursing, March 2006
Patients living with Alzheimer’s disease need people to remember for them. They need people to remember their medications, allergies, appointments and insurance forms. They also need people to remember how devastating the loss of memory is and how terrifying the imaginings that fill that void can be. Alzheimer’s patients need someone to remember to keep listening, even when they repeat themselves. Alzheimer’s patients also need their families, sometimes intensely, even as they slip farther and farther away from them. In the face of a devastating loss, families must make difficult decisions about care. They must become experts in juggling many obligations. They must also remember – sometimes with assistance – that obligations should be separated by occasional periods of joy and rest.
Families living with Alzheimer’s disease are fortunate to have an advocate with an excellent memory and considerable wisdom, knowledge and heart. As a case manager at Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Geriatric Assessment Center, she directly collaborates with patients and families to devise treatment plans that promote quality of life. She has created and led support groups for family members and currently leads a group dealing with the challenges of early onset. She generously shares her invaluable clinical experience with others to raise the standard of care. She is a frequent presenter in many settings and a leader in the Alzheimer’s Association of South Central Connecticut. She has already been honored by membership in the organization’s Hall of Fame. Her four decades in nursing have been marked by an extraordinary responsiveness to patient need and a drive to reshape systems to meet that need.
For her unselfish devotion to her patients and her profession, the Yale School of Nursing presents its Excellence in Caring in Chronic Illness Award to Blanche Agostinelli.
The lamp, a symbol of nursing since Florence Nightingale, serves as a perfect metaphor for the work of nursing patients with Alzheimer’s. The disease is a kind of darkness, transforming once familiar surroundings into something unknowable and frightening. Good nursing can be a light for patients and families. It can build on strengths and provide strategies to cope with loss. It can help patients and families navigate through the darkness together.
When the American Red Cross named Dianne Davis a Hero of New Haven County in 2004, they only confirmed what families in the Yale-New Haven Hospital Adler Geriatric Assessment Center had long known. She is selfless in her commitment to the patients and families she sees as a case manager. She is also dedicated to families she will never meet, as shown through her work with the Alzheimer’s Association of South Central Connecticut, where she is a Hall of Fame honoree, and with Memory Walk, a highly successful fundraiser in which she takes a leadership role. Through her writings, she has shared her expertise with many nurses, particularly in the area of advanced practice. A volunteer with the homeless at Columbus House and a leader in her faith community, her caring nature shines in all facets of her life.
For giving freely of her skills and herself as a clinician and an advocate, the Yale School of Nursing is proud to present the Excellence in Caring in Chronic Illness Award to Dianne Schilke Davis.
Speech writing
Speech to the Rotary Club, February 2002
Writer: Colleen Shaddox
Good afternoon. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be here with you today to talk about the young people my agency serves. Explaining Youth Continuum is a challenge, because our work is all over the place. We define ourselves as serving homeless and at-risk youth, but that’s a very broad definition.
I’ve seen all types of young people in our care. An infant who came to us covered with bruises from an emergency room. A pair of three-year-old twins who spoke their own made up language. They were so badly neglected by their mother that they never picked up English. I’ve seen boys of twelve and thirteen protest violently when we wouldn’t let them wear gang colors. I’ve seen the same boys show truly moving tenderness toward a flock of duck hatchlings that they are raising right now.
Our client list also includes a senior at Yale University, who once lived at our emergency shelter. Because Crystal’s mother is in prison and her father has never been part of her life, we offer the guidance and support that most college kids would get from a parent, as well as a place to live over the summer and during school breaks.
Edwin is 12. I’m especially fond of him because he reminds me of my own son, always hitting me up for Pokémon cards and cookies. The difference is that Edwin has attemped suicide again and again because the memories of what’s been done to him sometimes overwhelm the boy.
There’s Mike, whose single mother asked the state to take custody of her son because he was out of control. She couldn’t make him come home at night or go to school. She was losing him to drugs.
Anthony, who got too old for foster care and so drifted from one friend’s couch to another, until he came to Umoja House and got an apartment with us along with a chance to get back in school and work a steady job. I’m happy to say that he is now an accomplished tradesman making $17 an hour and about to move into his own apartment.
We run a safe home for very young abused and neglected children, two group homes for teens coming from similar circumstances, three juvenile justice programs, two programs that transition young adults to independent living and a street outreach program.
The services are varied, but there is a common denominator. Every youth we serve has been denied the care of a loving and responsible adult. There is no poverty more devastating than that. In some cases, parents have been criminally abusive. In others, a variety of factors — extreme youth, poverty, and drug abuse — rendered the parents absolutely unable to give the kids even the most basic level of care.
Another unfortunate common denominator among our clients is mental illness. When Youth Continuum opened 30 years ago, the organization mainly provided a warm bed and a kind word to troubled kids in New Haven. Now we find that we are getting children who are acutely mentally ill. This is happening for several reasons. One is that inpatient psychiatric care is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Bipolar disorder, paranoia, scizophrenia, and so on. Nobody wants kids with these very challenging problems, and so they come to us. We have also speculated that our kids have a higher level of mental illness now because the abuse they are suffering is so horrific. We believe that parental drug habits are to blame in many cases. In some of our programs, the majority of clients have post traumatic stress disorder.
So one of my major challenges has been to secure funding to provide psychiatric care in our facilities. For the most part, we are funded by the State of Connecticut, which pays for the care and board of these throwaway kids. But the rate, as you might imagine, is low. It keeps the lights burning and an adult staff on duty 24/7. But it does not allow us to employ as many skilled clinicians as we need, just as it does not pay for new backpacks in September, prom gowns in June, or many, many other things that we think the kids need and deserve all year long.
About 2000 young people use our services every year, so I could regale you with sad stories all day and well into the night. But the very last thing I want you to feel is despair, because despair is a paralyzing emotion, and my kids sorely need good hearted adults like yourselves to take action on their behalf. I want you to feel what I feel about my kids, and that is hope.
Those of you who are parents remember I’m sure that first moment when you see your baby and the whole world suddenly becomes a bright and wondrous place. Your child is so beautiful, so full of potential. Now I’ve heard people say that the parents of new babies are deeply deluded, that they cannot see straight, that new born babies are — and it hurts me to say this — ugly.
Well, those people are just wrong. I happen to know that new parents have supernaturally good vision. And that is because their vision is informed by overwhelming love. That love allows us to see the beauty and the potential in those pinched-up, wailing little faces. And because we see it we work hard to realize it. We rock them when they have colic. We spend hours drilling them on spelling words and spend fortunes straightening their teeth. We juggle big meetings so we can make to the school play and we tell them, early and often, that they are the sweetest and best part of our lives.
Kids who are brought up like that frequently neglect to clean their rooms, get piercings in places that make us shudder and choose careers that just make us shake our heads. But despite all this, they turn out to be pretty wonderful.
People ask me why our beds are always full, why there are so many throwaway kids in a society that is so fortunate in so many ways. I’ve got a simple answer: Nobody ever looked at their brand new little pinched up faces and saw all the beauty and potential there and so nobody ever did the work that needed to be done to realize that potential.
But I tell you this: That potential and that beauty never really goes away. I see it very clearly in every kid we serve. My job is to make you see it too.
Because it really will take a villiage to raise my kids properly. But it can be done. Let me give you a few examples:
Homeless kids tend to do poorly in school. This comes as no great surprise. They’ve certainly got more on their minds than passing geography. Simply getting the paperwork together to get a kid with no permanent address enrolled is a job. Sadly it is a job that many schools actually try to make more difficult than it needs to be. Because homeless kids bring with them a whole world of problems. And even the most caring educators find it hard to address those problems knowing that the kid will probably move on sooner rather than later.
So we got ourselves some Department of Education funding, and we hired a mommy. I think we actually call her an education coordinator, but she does what most parents do for their kids. She gets the kid enrolled in school, goes to parent-teacher conferences, sets rules about when homework needs to get done, and so on. Since Kenyetta has been performing these very essential services, truancy has gone way down among our kids and grades have gone way up.
Through Yale’s generosity, kids in our New Haven juvenile justice program are able to take horseback riding lessons. I must admit that my own reaction when I first heard about the program was — well, that’s nice, but what’s the point? The point is this: they spend time caring for the horses and cleaning the stables before they do any riding. It’s a lesson about the rewards of hard work and the satisfaction of caring for someone else. It’s a lesson about the joy of achievement. And I can tell you that for these boys, many of whom come to us hard as nails, it is a truly beautiful experience.
And the final example of our successes I’m going to give you is my friend, Nadya. Because Nadya has school and work commitments you have to settle for me tonight, but she is a far more eloquent speaker than I could ever hope to be. Nadya was a couch surfer, as are most homeless teens in this area. Kids usually don’t sleep under bridges or on top of street grates. Instead they drift from one friend’s house to another. Sooner or later, the friend’s parents will grow tired of the situation and it will be time to move on. Most of these kids do go to school, but often even their teachers are unaware of their plight. They really are the hidden homeless.
Well, Nadya came to us several years ago as a client. I’m so pleased to tell you that we’ve now been funded to hire her as an outreach worker. She’s an ambassador to other young people in the same situation that she escaped. She brings them information about getting free health care, domestic violence services, counselling, shelter and a host of other services. Many of the kids Nadya connects to eventually enter one of our independent living programs.
Nadya is a talented, committed, thoroughly terrific young woman. And some might say that she made it because she is exceptional. But my very strong belief is that every kid has that same potential. We believed in Nadya and we had the resources to help her make things happen for herself.
It is very difficult to get the resources our kids need. Afterall, they have no influence; they can’t speak for themselves. I will be the first to admit that repairing severely damaged lives is an expensive undertaking. But I’m also here to tell you that it is good business. Without significant intervention, many of our kids would eventually swell the ranks of the adult homeless population or become incarcerated. Then their cost to society, even without accounting for lost productivity, will be astronomical. We cannot afford not to help these kids now.
I’ve come tonight looking for friends and partners. Our organization has traditionally done very little development, a trend that simply cannot continue. So I’m hoping that some of you will be interested enough in what you’ve heard to want to learn more, to come visit a program, to be an ambassador for us among your friends and colleagues. I just happen to have brought along some information that would help you in that enterprise.
I’m very grateful for your interest in Youth Continuum and the people we serve. And I’m honored to be invited on a night when you are already making a contribution to fight hunger in our community. I think that whenever we give to a worthy cause we surround ourselves with peace and plenty. I wish you much of both in the coming year.