Booklist Review
March 15, 2013

Expect to be moved by this anthology of tales from the front line, written by veteran nurses and nurses-in-training. One contributor describes her experiences as a nursing student at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was called gay-related immune-deficiency syndrome, particularly her “nurse’s intuition,” that is, knowing when a patient is going to die. “There was a stigma to the work I was doing,” she writes. “But I eventually got to a point where I wasn’t afraid to say, when someone asked what I did, ‘I work with persons who are dying of AIDS.’” Several of the essayists lace their emotional tales with humor. A University of Pennsylvania nursing student records her friends’ reaction to her job: “So you actually cleaned up poop?” A woman who survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teen becomes an oncology nurse. And a male nurse recounts watching a person die for the first time. Essayists note that they’re not supposed to get “too close” to patients, but they do it anyway. It’s easy to love these empathetic people, and their beautifully written stories.

— Karen Springen

"Beautifully written stories." —Booklist

Tavia Gilbert’s narration of these essays written by nurses is beautiful and profound. Nurses are the often invisible backbone of the healthcare system. Gilbert delivers all the essays, irrespective of gender or ethnicity, capturing the spirit of each one. They reflect personal growth as well as social and scientific progress. The hysteria of AIDS once meant that nurses weren’t even allowed to enter the rooms of AIDS patients, and now an HIV-positive individual might die of old age. Gilbert translates all the emotions, including fear, gallows humor, gratitude, and empathy. A baby born with half a heart dies shortly after birth, but the nurse treats both the baby and the parents with compassion and dignity. A home care nurse is the only attendee at the funeral of a client without family—and Gilbert does a terrific grumpy old man, too. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine