Laura Keegan is a wife, mother of four, author, and Family Nurse Practitioner. She began her clinical practice in 1988. Her previous work experience includes working as an FNP in varied settings including the Institute for Urban Family Health in Manhattan, the Peekskill Area Health Center and Riverside Pediatrics in Croton and her independent practice Lifeforce Family Health Care. Her previous hospital experience includes Columbia Presbyterian in Manhattan and Montefiore in the Bronx. Her first professional employment experience after college was in research in the Pharmacology Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her formal education includes undergraduate study at Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science With Highest Honors majoring in Physiology from the University of California at Davis. Her nursing education includes two Master of Science degrees from Pace University.
Laura founded Lifeforce Family Health Care in 2000, where she cared for newborns to elders, in order to facilitate, support, and validate the innate nurturing and healing abilities of individuals, families, and communities through listening, ongoing information exchange, and provision of individualized health care services and consulting.
Laura’s current practice is a consulting practice with a focus on helping individuals and mothers and fathers find and use their inner physician, when caring for themselves and their children. In addition, Laura provides guidance on navigating the health care system when necessary.
Laura writes, "Lifeforce is the vital impulse of life. When we don't pay attention to it, we not only lose its benefits, we also are more likely to cause harm."
Laura's passion is to be completely present and listen to the individual and their advocates. Sometimes in a health care system often dominated by entrenched practices, the importance of information sharing, and recognizing and utilizing the innate nurturing and healing abilities of individuals, families and advocates is overlooked at the risk of losing critical input.
Laura’s book focuses on her work with moms and newborns. Laura helped breastfeeding moms and their babies her entire career. For decades she shared images with breastfeeding moms and their families to refer to at home after their visits, in order to give additional opportunities for mothers to imprint breastfeeding behaviors that prevent pain and other common breastfeeding problems.
Inspired by her patients' generous participation in and requests for an image rich breastfeeding book, Laura authored and self-published the limited print first edition of Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy in 2008. Her expanded release eBook followed and is available at booksellers below.
Laura writes that it is her "hope and wish that you learn from, enjoy and treasure the images brought to you in Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy, as you would an artistic expression of your own choosing."
Laura's EXPANDED RELEASE of Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy available worldwide in eBook at Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle (links below) contains the timeless "how-to" breastfeeding information available in the limited print first edition and has continued to be inspired by her patients, some of whom have joined the Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy community.
In addition, the EXPANDED RELEASE further validates this timeless information with more documentation that has been recorded and made available since the first edition. There are more images and video and additional appendices, including a medical journal article reprint in Appendix H sharing the practice of bringing baby to Mom at birth in the operating room. Appendix G is a very special story, with accompanying images and video, written by a mother that reveals how lifesaving keeping moms and babies at birth can be. 'Mum' resuscitated her baby with skin-to-skin after medical resuscitation efforts failed and were abandoned, and her baby boy was brought to her to say goodbye.
Laura brings these resources, images and video together in one place so that they are easily shared as a whole and not fragmented. Laura validates, in plain view, that moms' wishes to be with their babies at birth are consistent with what is good for both. The reader witnesses that mothers' wishes, requests and instinctive responses to their babies come from a place of knowing and are consistent with life giving and even life saving practices.
The Institute for Family Health, an affiliate of Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, purchased quantities of Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy for the education and training of residents in their Family Medicine training program and for mothers in their Centering Pregnancy program.
WIC agencies in Herkimer, Madison, and Oneida Counties, NY purchased quantities of Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy for gifts for all their breastfeeding clients and for the education of and use by their lactation professionals and peer counselors. Kisswana pictured and quoted on the ABOUT page received her copy through this program and joined the Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy community in the EXPANDED RELEASE.
Seeing is believing. Laura encourages families and friends to gift and share Breastfeeding with Comfort and Joy with pregnant and breastfeeding moms; and encourages women to share it with their birth practitioners as a cohesive image rich resource to help them see the importance of keeping babies and moms together at birth when Mom and baby are medically stable and to change practices where this is not done.
