Everything in this book happened. These are real nurses and real patients. And the true stories that nurse Carolyn Fink gathers here are the real stuff of life, as lived by some unforgettable human beings and their nurses:
- The con artist with the bogus bad back . . . >
- The beautiful eighteen-year-old paralyzed by a hit-and-run driver . . .
- The shy Navajo grandmother who chose to sleep on the floor rather than in a hospital bed . . .
- The big shot who installed a fax machine next to his heart monitor . . .
These and many others play their parts in this wonderful book and teach us much about ways of living and dying, the bitter ironies of fate, and the twin miracles of love and healing.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, M.D., the author of Love, Medicne & Micacles, wrote the following of On Duty:
Every life is a story. On Duty shares the stores that can help us appreciate life more. Death and illness enlighten us and truly teacch us about life. A nurse is in a unique position to experience this truth and share it.
Nancy Roeder wrote the following about On Duty.
On Duty is a collection of 15 true life stories told through voices of real nurses. The setting is a large university hospital in a southwestern U.S. city.
Closely knit as a group through their common work at a hospital and its cancer ward, they began to talk about their experiences during socialization after hours, finding common ground during the ever-present decompression, “let your hair down” times. Through these tales, they offer us a glimpse of the day-to-day world of the daily nurse, a world mixing the commonplace with extraordinary and the mundane with the miraculous.
The author, Carolyn Parnall Fink, an RN herself, gathered these stories during many tape recorded sessions. Two of the stories are her own. A prevailing theme of these sometimes humorous but more often poignant sketches is the mutual respect and love engendered between patient and nurse. The stories come to us in swift narration and remembered conversations, lending a sense of reality to the world created for the reader. This dual focus on nurse and patient lends credence to one of the major ways the disparate stories tie together – that the nurses learn as much about life and death from their patients, as do their patients themselves. Healing and hope abound amidst tragedy and terror.
Medical professionals of all kinds will love this book, but so will people who have
ever had a brush with hospitalization, either for themselves or their loved ones.