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Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, And Everything In Between (2010)

by Theresa Brown(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0061791555 (ISBN13: 9780061791550)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

HarperOne

review 1: I liked the parts of the book that I didn't find so chatty. Some of the book seems rather redundant and naive, but I expect that seeing as she's a new nurse and the tales are unique to her experience and what she's learned from them. Her lesson seems to always be that nurses are a valuable part of the team and that patient care isn't something that you learn in school. Sometimes the smallest gestures matter most to patients and families. She also talks a lot about death and dying, something that I worked closely with volunteering in hospice care. You never really know when a patient is going to die. Sometimes it's sudden and sometimes the signs are there. And dealing with families are always a unique experience. Sometimes the smallest gestures let them know that you care, ... moreand it's a wonderful thing. I liked this book because she seems to be a good nurse who actually loves her job, which is quite common in nursing, while I feel like a lot of nurses, specifically younger ones, are often the ones putting their exasperation in writing, giving the job the image of being a bunch of burnouts who aren't very patient or caring.
review 2: As a nurse turned librarian I found Brown's telling of her first year as a professor turned nurse interesting. Basically a series of essays, the book read as a somewhat egocentric novel that introduces some (but not exhaustively) nursing issues as they pertained to Brown. I would have liked more expansion on the issues rather than Brown's singular experience (but hey! It's a biography). I was intrigued by the references to differences between 20-something new nurses and 40-something new nurses - an example of an issue that could have been explored. Brown's experience on her first unit should be a caution for new nurses: the culture of a particular unit can easily make or break you -- when you are new, it is how you judge yourself. less

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