An essay about my daughter receiving a rare genetic diagnosis, published in The New York Times, September 2018:
An op-ed about the moral crisis in healthcare and the importance of advance care planning, published in The L.A. Times, December 2017:
Why you should make end-of-life care decisions now
An essay on end-of-life care and intensive care, published in The New York Times, August 2015:
The I.C.U. is Not a Pause Button
An essay about motherhood, published in Dame Magazine, May 2015:
I Chose to Become a Young, Single Mother
An excerpt from a work-in-progress, published in the Hypocrite Reader, November 2014:
Halloween Dance Party on the Farm
An essay on death in intensive care, published in the Brooklyn Rail, November 2012:
A blog post about an Institute of Medicine lecture on images of death in popular culture, on KevinMD, January 2013:
Pop Culture and the Sanitized Images of Death
A blog post about allowing natural death in an ICU, on the TedMed blog, February 2013:
SOFT SCIENCE Notes from Kristen McConnell 
I have just retired after 50 years in a surgical ICU, I have NEVER read anything so spot on as your essay. How many times has it broken our hearts to reintubate or resuscitate someone who clearly should be allowed to die in as much peace as possible in an ICU. How many times have we argued with surgeons to clearly spell out the patient’s prognosis to anxious family and to the patient himself. A difficult conversation, surely, but much, much kinder than the “long pause” in the ICU. Thanks for putting words to our nursing reality