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Get Well Soon!: My (Un)Brilliant Career As A Nurse (2012)

by Kristy Chambers(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0702248231 (ISBN13: 9780702248238)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

University of Queensland Pr (Australia)

review 1: Apparently this is the second book Chambers wrote, as she shredded her first book, which "was no great loss for the literary world, only the trees." She should have shredded this book also before it was published.Hopefully this author has found a fulfilling job elsewhere and is no longer working as a nurse....because she is a disgrace to her profession, if what she is writing is all true, which, I highly doubt.It was a difficult book to read due to the amateur writing, but I slogged through it trying to find something redeeming about this book. But there is nothing.Certainly working as a nurse is a challenging profession but Chambers with her very limited experience as a nurse, has painted most patients and fellow staff as idiots. And although there are patients and sta... moreff who are idiots, perhaps if she treated them with more respect, she would see that each person is unique.One of those books which one is happy to return to the library, and hope they lose the copy.
review 2: I really struggled with deciding just what to rate this book - it is probably more a 2.5 than a 2, but couldn't quite give it a 3.I was looking forward to this book as I thought it sounded like an interesting and humorous take on the nursing profession. It certainly wasn't what I expected!Can I say up front there is nothing wrong with the way the book is written - the writing is good and has an easy to read style. Although it jumped over the place a bit in terms of time and place, the way the chapters are arranged made it easy enough to follow. It was the content I struggled with - the whole time I was reading I was battling between really admiring Kristy and also getting very annoyed with her.Right from the beginning Kristy reveals that she did not choose nursing with any kind of real thought. Very early into the book she reveals herself as a bit of slacker who has never had much direction in life. This theme is amusing enough to begin with, but it begins to grate as it is constantly reinforced throughout the book. By the end I just wanted to tell her to get over herself - that she wasn't the only person in the world who had struggled with a career choice and that she was the only person who could figure that out. The world didn't owe her a living just because she ended up in a job she didn't really like.On the flip side, I had to admire that Kristy had chosen the more difficult areas of nursing, such as working with anorexia patients and in emergency and drug and alcohol units. There is very little that is "nice" about this kind of nursing and kudos to her for caring for those that the rest of the world don't spend much time thinking about.Back to the other side of the fence, I found it quite disrespectful the way Kristy spoke about some of her patients. Being well acquainted with many nurses I really do understand that nursing can be a very messy, smelly, difficult job. I know that cleaning up vomit and poo is not fun. But it is all part of the job and I'm certain that sick people do not take any joy in knowing that the nursing staff have to clean up after them. While I know that many nurses do use the words "piss" and "shit" rather than their milder forms, it was quite confronting to be bombarded with those terms all the time. I just found that to be a little bit immature and again something that was reinforced just a bit too often.Good on Kristy for first of all studying nursing (a degree is no mean feat) and staying in the profession, despite her apparent apathy for it. Good on her too for taking on the difficult stuff and literally getting her hands dirty. But if she really doesn't like it, then she should explore a new career direction rather than trying to get the world to feel sorry for her.Going by other reviews, you're probably going to either love this book or hate it. Or you might be like me and torn about just how you feel about it. Maybe I shouldn't have read it so soon after Bush Nurses, which celebrated the difficulties of nursing in a much more positive way.I am glad I stuck it out to the end, but am still not totally sure how I feel about this one! less

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