Palliative care nurse (and former English professor) Theresa Brown talked with Terry Gross yesterday on NPR, discussing her new book tracing the fates of four patients over 12 hours in a cancer ward.

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives (Workman/Algonquin) is a moving and riveting medical account of struggle, hope, fear, and the daily demands of nursing.

Holds are heavy in some libraries and the book is on the verge of breaking into Amazon’s top 100.

Brown previously worked in a hospital’s oncology unit but now spends her time in home-based hospice care. Her first book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between (Harper) was highly regarded and has been adopted as a textbook in nursing schools.

Brown and Gross discuss the challenges of nursing, the stress of time and work pressures that cost patients the care they need, the desire for honesty in diagnosis, and the experience of home care.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2015 at 2:21 pm and is filed under 2015 -- Fall, Diet & Health, Memoirs, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.