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Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient
by
40/99
Critics
28/99
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Scholars
27/99
Rating
52/99
Volume
10/99
Rating
45/99
Volume
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About This Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Shift comes a frank look at navigating the world of healthcare as a cancer nurse becomes a patient and experiences the system from the other side. Despite her training and years of experience as an oncology and hospice nurse, Brown finds it difficult to navigate the medical maze from the other side of the bed. Why is she so often left in the dark about procedures and treatments? Why is she expected to research her own best treatment options? Why is there so much red tape? At times she's mad at herself for not speaking up and asking for what she needs but knows that being a "difficult" patient could mean she gets worse care. Of the almost four million women in this country living with breast cancer, many have had, like Brown, a treatable form of the disease. Both unnerving and extremely relatable, her experience shows us how our for-profit health care industry "cures" us but at the same time leaves so many of us feeling alienated and uncared for. As she did so brilliantly in her New York Times bestseller, The Shift , Brown relays the unforgettable details of her daily life—the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the bureaucratic frustrations—but this time from her new perch as a patient, looking back at some of her own cases and considering what she didn't know then about the warping effects of fear and the healing virtues of compassion. "People failed me when I was a patient and I failed patients when working as a nurse. I see that now," she writes. Healing is must-read for all of us who have tried to find healing through our health-care system.
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Reviews
"Alternating the narrative between her time as a nurse and as a patient, she passionately shares the range of emotions she felt ..."
"Most importantly, Brown shows us the importance of perspective."
"What she does offer lifts Healing above the usual fare in the ever-expanding genre of illness memoir: an unflinching look by a former nurse at the lack of compassion in our health-care system and the harms that patients suffer because of it."
"Brown's in-depth account of caring for the health of patients while simultaneously navigating her own health care is especially timely as the world enters another year of pandemic."
"In between her searing critiques, Brown offers glimpses of how things might go if only medical workers saw beyond the tasks at hand and had more time and fewer tasks to manage ..."
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