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When a Nurse Becomes a Patient
by Theresa Brown
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.
"Revealing and heart-wrenching...Alternating the narrative between her time as a nurse and as a patient, she passionately shares the range of emotions she felt and offers advice for both patients and nurses who are facing breast cancer...By sharing her story, Brown delivers much-needed advocacy for those who are often ignored or misunderstood. An essential read for all members of the medical community." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Timely...Brown's clear-eyed and eloquent examination of illness—from the inside and from the outside—is illuminating…moving and enlightening." - Library Journal
"Healing is a stunning book that helped me understand how to survive a serious illness and how to understand hospitals in general. Theresa Brown, RN, is also a hell of a good writer." - James Patterson
"This is the book I want to give to all my colleagues and patients—a smart, moving, clear-eyed, yet ultimately hopeful jewel of a read on health and care from one of the most thoughtful healthcare writers I know." - Pauline W. Chen, MD, New York Times contributor and bestselling author of Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
"A deeply moving story of an oncology nurse forced to navigate our imperfect health care system after an ultrasound exam upends her life. Brown offers important lessons for patients and health care providers alike." - Damon Tweedy, New York Times bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
This information about Healing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Theresa Brown, RN, author of the New York Times bestseller The Shift, has been a contributor to the New York Times. Her writing appears on CNN.com and in the American Journal of Nursing, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has been a guest on MSNBC Live and NPR's Fresh Air. Her first book was Critical Care, and during what she calls her past life, she received a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She lectures nationally and internationally on issues related to nursing, health care, and end of life.
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