Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/563498
As I read the book, I was taken back to my early days as a nurse when I worked as a home health nurse at the Mary Breckinridge Hospi- tal, in 1994. This was 50 years after the Frontier Nursing Service had begun and some things had changed. We were driving four-wheel drive vehicles called Trackers, instead of the jeeps and horse- back used by the nurses in 1925. But we were going to the same areas seeing patients whose ances- tors were seen by Mary Breckinridge. Montell's book also includes stories from nurses all across the state of Kentucky who had worked in different areas of nursing, from the hospital setting to clinics to nursing homes, and even in schools. Most of the stories were humorous and some of the stories really stood out to me because they were so similar to my own nurs- ing experiences when I worked as an ER nurse. The story of the drunk man that ran naked out of the ER into the street and was cap- tured by the police and brought back to the hospital, is probably a story that can be told by many nurses from many hospitals, because these are the things we deal with and accept as part of nursing. I also found much humor in reading of the woman who came to the ER and told the staff that she was Elvis' sister and had brought a tape recorder and some music to sing and dance to. Some of the stories brought to mind the harsh reality of nursing and dealing with death and dying. One nurse told of working the ER one night when a young boy was brought in from a motor vehicle accident. The young boy didn't live and the nurse discovered he was a friend of her son. She told of how she held his mother and comfort- ed her not only as a nurse but a friend. Again this story was so real to me because, while I was on duty as an ER nurse, I too had held a friend of mine after she had lost her brother in a car accident. The book showed us glimpses from the past of how our govern- ment set up Medicare and Medicaid to help pay for healthcare. And about the beginning of other social programs that were set up to help people with low incomes to be able to afford healthcare and some of these are still in existence today. As a nurse and a native of east Kentucky, I really enjoyed reading Tales from Kentucky Nurses. I feel William Montell captured so much history of the area I live in and he mentioned so many places I personally have been to and seen first hand. But the one thing I enjoyed the most about this book was that it reminded me that no matter where we live, life and death are things nurses deal with every day throughout the year and have dealt with through the his- tory of nursing. And it is up to us to decide how we will handle it and how we can use our experiences to make a difference. —linda s. Campbell, rn THE SHIFT: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives By theresa Brown, rn algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2015 This book, by the New York Times columnist and practicing regis- tered nurse Theresa Brown, is probably the closest anyone has come in popular writing to accurately depicting what nurses actually do. Brown, who used to teach English literature and writing at Tufts Uni- versity, uses her consider- able storytelling skills to bring readers along on one of her typical 12- hour shifts as an oncolo- gy RN at a Pittsburgh hospital, during which she cares for four patients: Dorothy, Sheila, Candace, and Irving. She starts from the very beginning, when her alarm clock goes off, and takes us through every single moment of the day, until she arrives back at home and goes to sleep in preparation for doing it all again the next morning. Because Brown is actually a working oncology nurse, nurses will appreciate how real her representation of nursing is. From the moment she hits the floor, it's a constant juggle of prioritization and reprioritization; mental to-do list making; multitasking; relation- ship-navigating with patients, doctors, nurse colleagues, and ancil- lary staff; figuring out ways to circumvent hospital hindrances (um, we mean protocols) to doing her job; and, above all, assessing and safely caring for her patients. Here's just one of many example of what is going through her mind at any given moment: "I turn back to my medcart, pick up the Rituxan. I could hang it and then talk to Sheila and her family. It would take fifteen, twenty minutes to check the drug, grab some vitals, hook it up, and record all that on the computer. Dorothy's gone, Candace is off the floor and Irving's yet to arrive. I could get the Rituxan going—making things a little easier for night shift since the sooner the drug starts the sooner it, and all the checks it requires, are done—then tell Sheila what's going on. But I don't." Brown decides instead to go talk to Sheila first to reassure her and give her some important information she has gleaned from the sur- geon scheduled to do surgery for her perforated bowel that night. As I was reading from chapter to chapter, the main feeling I noted in myself was one of anxiety. Shadowing Brown on this shift, trying to keep track of all the temperatures she needed to take, the phone calls to radiology she needed to make, the questions she needed to ask ever-so-tactfully of the attending doctors, and on, and on, and on, made me, as a reader, totally stressed out. When I realized how tense 20 n a t i o n a l n u r s e w w w . n a t i o n a l n u r s e s u n i t e d . o r g j u ly | a u g u s t 2 0 1 5