Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient

Deeply moving. --Damon Tweedy, New York Times bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat

New York Times bestselling author Theresa Brown tells a poignant, powerful, and intensely personal story about breast cancer. She brings us along with her from the mammogram that would change her life through her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Despite her training and years of experience as an oncology and hospice nurse, she finds herself continually surprised by the lack of compassion in the medical maze--just as so many of us have. Why is she expected to wait over a long weekend to hear the results of her cancer tests if they are ready? Where is the empathy from caregivers? Why is she so often left in the dark about procedures and treatments? At times she's mad at herself for not speaking up and asking for what she needs but knows that being labeled a difficult patient could mean she gets worse care.

As she did in her book The Shift, Brown draws us into her work with the unforgettable details of her daily life--the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the frustrated patients--but from her new perch as a patient, she also takes a look back with rare candor at some of her own cases as a nurse and considers what she didn't know then and what she could have done better.

A must-read for fans of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, Suleika Jaouad's Between Two Kingdoms, and all of us who have tried to find healing through our health-care system.

Author: Theresa Brown
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 04/12/2022
Binding Type: CD
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 5.60h x 5.70w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9798200881017

About the Author
Brown, Theresa: - Theresa Brown, BSN, RN, is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her writing appears on CNN.com and in The American Journal of Nursing, JAMA, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has been a guest on MSNBC Live and NPR's Fresh Air and is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Shift. Her first book was Critical Care. She has a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and lectures nationally and internationally on issues related to nursing, health care, and end of life.