 Hello and welcome to Senior Moment. My name is David Refson. I am your host for the show. Senior Moment is about seniors and for seniors. We are very pleased to have as our guest today, Ellen Miropol. She is a long-time activist, former teacher, nurse, former nurse practitioner, and she was involved in a study many years ago that changed medical practices and ultimately saved lives. Ellen, welcome to the show. Thank you, David. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit sort of about the beginning. I know we've talked a little bit about you and your political activism. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it led you sort of into teaching and eventually nursing? Well, I grew up in Washington, D.C. and which was a pretty exciting place to be a kid. When I was in high school, I was very active in civil rights. But when it came time to go to college, I wanted to get away from the East Coast. I wanted to find the real America. So I went to the Midwest and I went to a small college, a Quaker College, because to me Quaker meant AFSC and activism. And it was not a good match for me. I met my husband, Robbie, there, which was a very good thing. But coming from what was that year, the richest county in the United States, just outside of Washington, I was looking for something else. I was looking for something more politically relevant. And after two years at this college, I dropped out and I moved to the mountains of Kentucky. I moved to what was that year the poorest county in the country, not County, Kentucky. And I was the traveling art and recreation teacher for this county, which involved driving a red pickup truck down creek beds to get to one-room schools and teaching students ranging from first to eighth grade. It was very exciting and it led me to want to be an artist and to use art to talk about economic inequality and the things that were wrong with our country. This was the era of the Vietnam War and I was very involved in anti-war activity at that time. I ended up moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1968, January 1968, to live with Robbie and to work and eventually go back to college and finish up. When you went back to college, was this to be a teacher at that point? No, it was in art. It was always at that point it was to to study art with the goal of using art as a way of talking about politics, a way of inspiring people politically But 1968 in Ann Arbor was a time that was very difficult to think about studying anything. I understand. And we were very involved with SDS and the beginnings of the women's movement, the second wave women's movement. And that became really my education. And that seemed to last quite a while, even to this day, theoretically, political activism. In terms of political activism. Yeah, absolutely. So at some point you made a decision that nursing could be what might take you forward in your life. Is that true? Yeah, and that actually came about through the women's movement. Abortion was a huge issue at that point and women's reproductive rights in general. When Robbie and I moved to Western Mass in 1971, I became involved with a local organization called Women's Health Counseling Service. And this was before Roe v. Wade. So our mission was to help women make decisions about unwanted pregnancies and help them get what they needed. And then after Roe v. Wade, when the first abortion clinics were opened in Massachusetts, we were the people who were the counselors and we were hired by the clinic to do that work. It was in that experience that I realized how critical nursing was to the whole medical world. One incident in which there was a life-threatening emergency with a patient, it was the nurses who knew exactly what to do and who saved the life. And I said, I want to be like them. Nothing has changed much. Nurses are still critically important. Well, not only that, they seem to be the backbone of medical care, especially in hospitals. Well, because nurses tend to be the people who listen. Well, not only that, but they also know what they're doing and they have this constant patient contact. Yes. Every day, if not multiple times a day. So they realize a sense of what goes on with patients. So I went to nursing school and I went for a couple of reasons. One, because I wanted to work with women and doing nursing union work seemed like a good possibility. And two, because being an artist was not paying our rent and I needed to be able to support myself. So I became a nurse. I thought at that point I wanted to do midwifery eventually, but I loved pediatric nursing. I loved working with kids and families. Ended up working at Shriners Hospital for two and a half decades. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. Explain to me a little bit how you went from nursing to being a nurse practitioner. That's quite a step up. You're like quasi-doctor at that point, nurse practitioners. Today, they do a lot of things. They write prescriptions. They act in accordance with doctors, but they're pretty well-informed about how to deal with a lot of medical issues, to say the least. So how did that kind of happen? It was a gradual thing. I worked as an RN. I loved it. I started feeling that in a teaching hospital, often it's the medical residents who are telling the nurses what to do and the nurses often know a lot more than the residents do. From experience, from having been there and worked with those patients. And I decided I wanted to have more autonomy within my work. The hospital was supportive. I went back first and came to UMass and got a master's in child and adolescent nursing. And then came back a second time when UMass started a pediatric nurse practitioner program and did that. And I loved working at Shriners. I loved the population of kids and families with whom I worked. I want certainly to talk about your experience at Shriners, but this becomes a point in your life as you're working with Shriners that you and other folks started becoming aware of something that would eventually change medical procedures, and it definitely did save lives. So please talk about Shriners and talk about what we're trying to talk about here in terms of this sort of life-changing event here, please. So I worked primarily with children and adolescents with spina bifida, a birth defect in which some of the neural tissue, the spinal cord and other spinal contents are outside of the body when the baby's born. It was a fascinating population with many health challenges. So it was very complicated. It was very intellectually challenging as well as being just fantastic to have that kind of intimacy with patients and families. Be very close to them over time because they need it a lot. I worked with a group of nurses around New England, all of us who worked in spina bifida clinics. We met regularly, we shared resources, we taught each other new things, and at one of our meetings somebody brought up an article that a couple of us had seen in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting on a few cases of intraoperative anaphylaxis during surgery on kids with spina bifida. So in the middle of a procedure the patient would become very, very critically ill. An allergic reaction, which became anaphylactic in which the whole the body basically is at risk of dying. Several of us had seen this article and we all said it's really interesting. We have patients who are allergic to gloves, to the latex gloves that you wear all the time. Now this was in an era where latex gloves had become ubiquitous. It was universal precautions because of HIV and so medical and nursing personnel wore gloves for everything even when it wasn't necessary. And so two things happened. One was that the supply of gloves was not enough to keep up with the demand. And so all of a sudden more and more gloves were being manufactured and probably the manufacturing process was not getting rid of as many of the proteins, the allergens, as they had before. And you had all of these people, nurses and doctors and other healthcare providers wearing gloves all the time, being exposed to proteins that caused allergy. My patients who had most of them early, frequent and intense exposure to latex because of needing multiple surgeries and other kinds of procedures started having allergic reactions. Our nursing group said, well, this is great, but it's anecdotal. We need to know more. And so we started a study in four or five hospitals around New England where we had our clinics to find out how many of our patients really had experienced this, what were the things they were reacting to, how severe was it and what could we do about it. We then published our results in a small letter to the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of years later. And all of a sudden became part of a new phenomenon that was just starting to be noticed and reported on latex allergy in people with spina bifida and with health professionals. Well, you know, it's always amazing to me and we've just started to talk about it, how nurses are the forefront of any kind of medical situation, particularly in hospitals. Well, they are. And so if it wasn't in part, not totally, but in part for nurses saying, wait a minute here, there's something going on here and getting together and doing the research and then publishing an article to start this process. And also going to some of these hospitals, I know you had an experience at a particular hospital that they weren't so sure this was the route to go. Yeah. And so maybe you can kind of address that a little bit. Well first, let me just say that we were part of a team and there were allergists and other physicians as well as nurses and physical therapists and all sorts of people who were starting to recognize this and say we have to do something about it. But medical institutions are very slow to change and sort of standard practice is very slow to change. So one of my patients was having surgery at another medical at another hospital and I got a phone call that she had had a major problem during surgery and the surgery had to be stopped in order to save her life and I went over to the hospital to try to find out what had happened and to talk to the staff and when I suggested that it might be because of latex and showed them the articles, I was essentially laughed out of the operating suite but to give them credit within a few years that hospital and most hospitals finally did change their practice. So if you go into an exam room in an emergency room now you are much more likely to see vinyl gloves than latex ones. There has been a real understanding finally that latex allergy is real and has to be dealt with. Once the medical profession realized that this was in fact true, did you start to notice a drop in serious medical conditions, possibly death as a result of now not using latex gloves anymore? Did things kind of change in that regard? Things did change and I think hospitals really did change their practice, had physicians, offices and clinics. The problem is that there are many latex containing items that are not medical, that are just ordinary things that you find in the home and kids toys, kush bowls at that point were, you know, latex. And so one of the things that this nursing group did for quite a while and other groups as well is publish every six months an updated latex list. What are the things both medical and non-medical that contain latex and what are some alternatives that families and patients can use to prevent exposure? Sounds terrific. I want to move on a little bit because I know first of all that you're an accomplished author and one of the books that I wanted to tell people about it is called kinship right here. Kinship of Clover. Yes. Yes. Thank you. And so you've been writing for a while and obviously your experience in a lot of areas led you to become an author, correct? I always read a lot voraciously, and I would sometimes finish a book and I would say I could do that and sometimes I would finish a book and say, oh, I wish I'd written that, so good. And at some point I decided that if I was going to learn how to write fiction, I'd better start. My husband and I took a two-month sabbatical in quotes because neither one of us worked in a institution that had such a term in their vocabulary. Two months on an island off the coast of Maine writing. He was working on a political memoir. I was writing my first short stories and I loved it. I was in my early fifties at that point. I had never taken a creative writing class. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was totally obsessed with writing fiction. I started taking classes. I did a low residency MFA program to really learn craft. And my first novel was published in 2011. About two months short of going on Medicare. I know the feeling. You talked about a little bit about the theme of your books and I wanted to bring that up. So tell me a little bit about that. Well, first of all, I should say that I think that fiction is better at asking questions than answering them. So I like to think of my books as asking questions that I want the reader to think about. And I should say that these questions or themes evolve during the process of writing. I don't start with a theme. I start with a character or something that you know that I can't stop thinking about. But so the first novel I wrote, the question was probably, is it ever right to bend or even break the law in pursuit of justice? The second novel on Hurricane Island, which started when I was in the TSA security line at JFK Airport and this character just appeared in front of me and I watched in my mind as she was taken by Homeland Security officers off to a room and disappeared. And I wrote the novel to find out what happened to her. And the question was can this happen to an ordinary person and how bad could it be? Interesting stuff. Interesting stuff. The third novel is also about activism and how far can you go in pursuit of the things you believe strongly must be changed. I know we're going to start to run out of time soon, but there's something very important that I want to talk to you about. And I did not mention it at the beginning. And that is your involvement with the Rosenberg Foundation. And if you could talk a little bit about that, what the foundation is, your involvement in it a little bit? So I mentioned that I met my husband, Robbie Maripole, in college and it wasn't until I moved in with him two years later that he told me that he was the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and in some ways that was a major part of my political education because I knew about the Rosenberg case. But I didn't really know about it. And I started reading everything I could find and talking with him about it. And Robbie had always had this dream that he would at some point in his life start a foundation in honor of his parents. He didn't know what that foundation would do at that point. It wasn't until the late 1980s when he met somebody who was today whose children today were in a position similar to his of having his parents taken away and executed for their essentially political beliefs and activism. And so he started a foundation to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children in this country whose parents have been targeted because of their politics. And the fund provides for things like summer camp and therapy and music lessons. A lot of it around the arts and finding a way to express what has happened to them and figuring out that they're not alone, that there are other kids in similar situations. So I understand Robbie wanted to start this, but did you started together? Is that? Well, it's it's his project. I've been involved since the very beginning and was on the board until about four or five years ago when our daughter took over as director and Robbie stepped back as director, but stayed on the board. Are you still involved? I'm still involved peripherally. I'm not on the board anymore. Two mirror poles on one board is quite enough. So this has been going on for quite a while now. This is 1990. I would assume that a lot of children have gained access to this foundation. A lot of children have been helped, yes. That is absolutely terrific. Did you ever decide or talk about the idea of writing a book about this at all? Was it ever come up in a conversation? This is a look. We're still talking about this. How many years after this? This execution what? 1953. So we're talking 65 years ago. A long time. I wrote a dramatic program telling the story of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which has been performed, I think, five or six times now in New York, Berkeley, Boston, Northampton. I haven't wanted to write a novel about it, but if you think about the themes that I've talked about and the next book, which will be out early 2020, continues this theme, my books are all set on the tightrope between family loyalty, family commitment, and strongly held political beliefs often in clashes within a family. So those themes, there's no question that a lot of that material comes from Robbie's background, but it's been transformed into different stories and different eras. Very interesting. I wanted to bring up one of the last things before we have to stop. And just a quick note on the Strode Dog's Writers Guild. We're not going to have a lot of time, but your involvement, were you a founding member of this group? Yeah. About ten years ago, local poet and writing teacher Patricia Lee Lewis gathered five or six women in her living room to start developing a Writers Guild, a network of writers. You know, writing is really solitary and so having people with whom to share the process, sometimes share work, share resources, and just connect with is critical. So Strode Dog Writers Guild has become a pretty large and important organization to writers in the Valley. We try to cover the four Western counties, but really we're primarily focused in the Valley. We hold craft programs, open mics, three open mics a month in different parts of the Valley, and give writers an opportunity to get to know each other, to create programs that they need for their own growth as writers, and to not feel quite so isolated. Right. One last sort of comment. One of the things I noticed about the group is that there are a lot of seniors who are not only obviously, but a lot of folks who either haven't written before or they're starting something new and as they get older. So it's pretty interesting. Ellen, you have an incredible story to tell and I want to thank you so much for being a guest on the show. My pleasure. Thank you very much.