Big Breakfast with Hotcakes

What is the life experience needed to judge McDonald's?
Someone must always have food in their kitchen – 
No overtired toddlers in need of a happy meal -
No husband, half his weight from his cancer treatment - who is only able to eat - 
McDonald's

Have they ever taken care of a child with metastatic disease -
Who told you they will try to eat today if you get them -
McDonald's?

They have never seen hip bones jutting out - 
In places there should be more cushion.
Gaunt cheek bones.
They have never seen nurses holding children down to place NG tubes

Have they seen the retching?  
Small bodies convulsing untouched by the nausea medicine?
No hair to hold back near the toilet when the hair is gone.

How lucky are you to have never needed the lifeline - 
The 1,340 calories
The only meal he will eat for weeks.

Faculty member Jessica Keim-Malpass is a nurse scientist, an award-winning teacher, and an acute care pediatric nurse practitioner with an active clinical practice in UVA Health's division of pediatric hematology-oncology, where she is also the nurse practitioner lead of the long-term cancer survivorship clinic.  
 
A Betty Irene Moore Foundation and Costs of Care Fellow who has also earned funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health/NINR, and through a 2022 $1.2 million Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality R01 grant, her research focuses on predictive technology that helps clinicians identify and predict adverse events, work that integrates her deep knowledge of bedside critical care and keen abilities across data science and analytics. As a translational nurse scientist, she’s also helped advance health policy for children with serious, life-limiting illness, medical complexity, and her work with big data is creating new directions in and for nursing science.   
 
Inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2022, and a graduate of the School’s CNL, PhD, and post-master's programs, Keim-Malpass additionally earned three master’s degrees in health economics and pharma-economics (2021), regulatory science and biotechnology (2018), and health evaluation (2005), after earning an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University. She is widely published in scientific journals for her ground-breaking research and has earned praise for her prose as well, with recent works in JAMA Oncology, and other outlets, that offer a powerful literary lens on her lived experience with illness, loss, and grief.  
 
Keim-Malpass is a National Academy of Medicine Scholar in Diagnostic Excellence alumna, a member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society, and winner of several scientific and faculty leadership awards, including the School of Medicine’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Investigators, the Lucie Kelly Faculty Leadership Award, and the School’s Outstanding Faculty Research Publication Award.