Kathleen Grieger lives in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, in land covered with ponds, flowers and ferns. Facing brain surgery, she returned to the writing she had set aside for years, keeping track of and coping with--in her own way--all that was happening. In a conference with her medical team about risk versus success, the general consensus was that operating so close to Kathleen’s language and speech area posed too great a risk and they would have to let nature take its course. Then a neurologist who was using Kathleen’s poetry to help teach medical students stood and read some of her work, suggesting they could not sit by and watch this gift for words destroyed. The doctors decided to proceed with the surgery and, today, Kathleen continues to write. Her work has appeared in The Healing Muse, the Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine, Kaleidoscope, Blood and Thunder, and other secular and medical publications.