Mary Knudson

My love of writing about health and healthcare, medicine and science, began as a reporter for The Sun in Baltimore when unexpectedly I was assigned to the medical beat. For the next 17 years I wrote features, news stories, analytical pieces, and many front-page narrative tales and investigative series on cancer, AIDS, health care costs, new technology, personal health dilemmas, sports injuries, and much more. I've always loved doing projects and they can be satisfying for many reasons. A series I wrote with another reporter on biotechnology won one of the top two national awards for science writing, a Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). A series I wrote on the high rate of cancer in Maryland was reproduced for the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who wanted to use it in teaching, and the National Institutes of Health reproduced another series I wrote on the human nervous system to distribute to the public. A favorite piece was a long narrative on a family's decision to let a young man in a coma die and the problems they faced doing it.

But probably my most interesting year was the one spent at Harvard when I won a Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health, and learned from professors at Harvard and MIT. I wanted to observe in a basic cancer research lab for a series on how science gets done, but the director of the lab said there would be no observing, everybody in his lab works. So I had to work alongside the postdocs and a grad student and a visiting fellow and scribble notes into a reporter's notebook I kept open on the bench. I managed to clone a frog growth gene while gathering material for a front-page series "Life in a Lab" which The Sun kindly entered for a Pulitzer.

I have freelanced, worked with needy children, and for 17 years taught science and medical writing and other nonfiction at Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins I suggested a required curriculum to get a master's in science and medical writing, brought in new faculty, and created a course that for the first time allowed students to shadow doctors and hear from many of the best at Hopkins on the complexities, unknowns, and challenges involved in practicing medicine today. Later I taught medical faculty to write for the public.

How much fun it was to co-edit two books on science writing, working with so many great colleagues. A Field Guide for Science Writers, second edition, is used to teach science writing in universities throughout the U.S. and in other countries. To write a series of books on female scientists, I went to their places of work in Alaska, the West Coast, the heartland, and back to Maryland. I served on the board of NASW for 10 years and helped create the NASW annual professional workshops, was a president of the D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA), and Freedom Forum Medical Journalist-in-Residence at Ithaca College in New York.

Every medical writer likes to find a good human interest story and I was startled to find one in myself when in 2003 I couldn't walk from my kitchen to my library on the first floor without stopping because I was out of breath. I was diagnosed with heart failure and one cardiologist urged me repeatedly to go on a heart transplant waiting list. My own research showed me I was not on the recommended medicines for treating heart failure and I finally found a cardiologist who was expert in treating the condition, including mine. I got well, keeping my own natural heart. My experience navigating the healthcare system led me to write the book Living Well With Heart Failure, the Misnamed, Misunderstood Condition, with my fourth cardiologist Edward Kasper, M.D. My purpose is to alert the public to this growing health problem and help those who get heart failure and their families understand the condition and how to take care of it. My biggest message is to educate yourself about heart failure and how to treat it and then get involved in your treatment plan. This is a new day for many people with heart failure. As I say in my introduction to the book:

"Life is choices. I can only wonder where I would be today and how I would be feeling if I had been a passive patient and let myself get placed on a heart transplant waiting list.

I, along with you who have heart failure are the new face of heart failure in the twenty-first century. Many, many of us will not proceed to death from heart failure. We will not proceed to transplantation. We will just proceed."

I have a soft spot in my heart for animals who need a home and many have joined my family over the years. Among my family members have been a collie and 2 of her pups, a mixed breed with the sweetest smile, 2 pit bulls, 2 beagles and a treeing walker coonhound, and a host of stray and feral cats. Each April I have an almost therapeutic need for the baseball season to begin. I am active on Twitter under @maryknudson.