Care Rewritten | Ending the Trauma of Care Together

When your child receives a rare diagnosis, you quickly realize how broken and isolating the healthcare system can feel.  That's why Mary is sitting down with Kate Kostolansky, Founder & CEO of Brave Bears Club. What started as late-night notes after her daughter Charlotte’s Infantile Spasms diagnosis turned into a national movement to reduce medical trauma for pediatric patients and their...

What happens when tech-driven medicine starts driving a wedge between us and the families we care for?  World-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Alan R. Cohen joins Mary to pull back the curtain on four decades at top institutions like Boston Children’s and Harvard. Drawing from his memoir Comfort Always , Dr. Cohen breaks down how we reclaim the art of healing, balance hard truths with hope...

What if the biggest barrier to humane healthcare isn't a lack of compassion, but a broken system that leaves clinicians without the time or tools to deliver emotionally safe care? Imagine what happens when a pediatric nurse of 36 years decides she’s done watching healthcare fail our children’s emotional well being. From bedside ER trauma to founding a game-changing startup, DD Fritch is sitting do...

One mom had the need for her daughter's feeding tube tools... Another mom, who had lost her son, had the means and wanted to pay it forward. The only thing missing between them was a bridge. The trauma caused in pediatric care is not a resources problem - it’s a design and permission problem. We are not short on clinicians or parents who know how to make care less scary for kids; we are short on p...

What happens when twenty years on the frontlines turns a daily clinical headache into a nationwide healthcare solution? In this special episode of Care Rewritten , Mary sits down for her very first guest interview with Katherine Stokes R.T. (R) (MR), founder of Spongie's Comfort. Katherine pulls back the curtain on leaving job security behind, pushing past the naysayers to build a tool nurses actu...

What if we showed up more like toddlers when we clocked into our care units?  When two developmental researchers set up an experiment in 2006, they discovered something extraordinary: toddlers as young as fourteen months will spontaneously jump in to help a struggling adult—without being asked, and without needing a reward.  It's just proof that we arrive on this planet naturally hardwired to part...

The people driving the most meaningful change in healthcare right now aren't sitting in C-suite offices with massive budgets... They are on the front lines, staring directly at the care they deliver. But most of them are waiting for someone to give them permission to begin. It's time for us to redefine what success in healthcare innovation actually looks like and understand why action - not just t...

When people attack your credentials instead of your evidence, it isn't about your competence - it is about their ego. Even after centuries of historical change makers speaking out against preventable medical trauma, we still find ourselves facing the exact same "permission fight" today. So we're pulling back the curtain on how human ego and hierarchy continue to stand between proven improvements a...

In November of 1999, a single report landed in Washington and sent shockwaves through healthcare by putting a number to a crisis that had been happening silently for decades. Nothing about the medicine changed that month... What changed was that someone finally said it out loud in a way that made it impossible to ignore, lighting the match for a global movement. We're zooming all the way out to ex...

If we’ve been a little quiet on our end lately, it’s not because we took a breather - it’s because something massive has been brewing behind the scenes, and six years in, this movement is officially hitting a tipping point. In this Mid-Year Review, we're pulling back the curtain and inviting you to take a peek at the quiet shifts happening inside both The Butterfly Pig and the Innovative Care Inst...

Nurse turnover, safety incidents rooted in pediatric fear, and dismal patient satisfaction scores are often treated by hospital leadership as the "inevitable costs of being on the road." But they aren't inevitable at all. In this Micro Moments episode - inspired by a near-miss on the freeway on the way to Mary's two year old’s developmental assessment - we're breaking down how healthcare systems a...

"We can't afford that." These are the most expensive four words in American medicine. In 2026, with 84% of healthcare executives naming financial pressure as their single greatest and when the spreadsheet gets tight, the first things to get cut are the things that sound like comfort—like child life, music therapy, and "the soft stuff." But can we really afford to keep building a healthcare system...

17 years. That is the average time it takes for proven research evidence to make it into everyday clinical practice in healthcare. When a hospital committee meets monthly to review, revise, and re-review a single proposal, it adds a minimum of 90 days of pure waiting to a decision that the people closest to the work could have made in five days... confusing risk management with risk avoidance and...

When leadership stops hearing hard truths and frontline clinicians feel like their voices don't have a permanent seat at the table, the truth about trauma prevention at the bedside gets left on the floor. This is the healthcare dichotomy that no one is talking about... until today. Leadership may genuinely believe that their existing efforts are landing perfectly, but what's actually happening is...

When we rely on an individual clinician’s "good bedside manner" to carry the emotional weight of a shift, we leave compassionate care completely up to chance. When staffing shortages or high-stress conditions hit the fan, we sometimes default to a "just get it done" mindset... prioritizing speed while unknowingly stripping the humanness out of healthcare, breaking family trust, and spiking our own...

Looking at pediatric care through a playful lens is often dismissed as an optional luxury, but the tiny interactions we choose at the bedside have the absolute power to make or break clinical accuracy. When we rely on brute force to "just push through" a routine measurement on a terrified child, we leave ourselves with inaccurate data, wasted time, and a compounding cycle of medical trauma that st...

Waiting for the perfect conditions and the absolute perfect words before you speak up is the fastest way to ensure no action is ever taken. When we allow a punitive culture to shame us for our imperfections, we internalize an impossible standard that completely stalls progress while families continue to experience preventable trauma at the bedside. In this episode (recorded straight from my car),...

Medical trauma isn't reserved just for level 1 accidents. It happens in the quiet, everyday moments when a patient's voice is silenced by a natural hierarchy. Emotional harm is rarely personal... It is the predictable result of a broken system that fails to give even the most compassionate clinicians the infrastructure to provide emotional safety.  Just like we built scannable armbands to protect...

What if the secret to fixing the most persistent, frustrating problems in healthcare didn't actually live inside a hospital at all?  After a massive webinar I hosted last year, I received hundreds of five-star reviews and a tidal wave of support. But do you know what my brain did? It blew up the eight one-star reviews to mean so much more.  Our brains are literally wired for survival to scan for t...

Right now, the emotional temperature of healthcare is hot . Staffing shortages, safety events, and relentless pressure have pushed our nervous systems into survival mode.  And when you are in survival mode, what happens? Your brain's alarm system takes over, your frontal lobe goes quiet, and you literally cannot access the part of your brain where solutions and creativity live.  That's why we are...

Evidence doesn’t implement itself... You can have the best research in the world and the most skilled clinicians on the floor, but if the culture isn't built to receive innovation, the status quo will always win.  I spent years watching children have experiences that were far more traumatic than they needed to be - not because the staff didn't care, but because the system wasn't built to support t...

Quality improvement project is a term commonly thrown around in the hospital setting. It's often viewed as a checkbox to climb the clinical ladder or something to pad a resume. But what if I told you that QI projects are actually the most misunderstood, and most strategic, tools you have?  They aren't just about compliance or accreditation. They are the bridge between the innovation you’re already...

When a procedure begins to escalate, our natural instinct is to "just get it done." But forcing care in a room with a rising emotional temperature doesn't save time… it creates secondary trauma for the patient, the parent, and the clinician. That’s why we are exploring a structured clinical intervention designed to downshift the nervous system and move a team out of survival mode. An intentional p...

What if rushing through procedures to "save time” actually created the resistance and trauma we are trying to avoid?  Slowing down to integrate medical play isn't an indulgence… it’s evidence-based infrastructure. New data from a multi-hospital study reveals the impact that just one interaction can have on patient anxiety and cooperation. When we move play out of the "optional" category and into t...

Innovation is often romanticized as breakthrough technology, but in healthcare, it usually begins with a clinician quietly solving a problem.  When we rely on individual workarounds and "jerry-rigged" solutions to get through a shift, we unknowingly increase cognitive load and clinical risk. It is time to look inward at where your team is currently "making do" and turn those micro-decisions into s...