Review: 4 stars
My lovely nanny is an avid reader, and she passed ‘A Nurse’s Story’ to me one day after seeing my stacks of books lying around the condo. Her rain-battered and tear-stained copy bore the scars of obsessive reading, so I was excited to dive into it.
‘A Nurse’s Story’ is Tilda Shalof’s partly-biographical retelling of her most salient encounters working as an ICU nurse in the Toronto hospital system. Throughout highly-entertaining, sometimes disgusting, and often touching patient narratives, she interweaves several key theses: (1) the role of a nurse is intricate and indispensable, and is being undermined by government budget cuts, (2) nurses need to first take care of themselves, before they can take care of others, and (3) the unecessary prolonging of “life” can be cruel and selfish.
My husband is a physician, so I’ve often heard him sing the praises of nurses, and at times, vent in frustration at oversights that a nurse made. But he has been unwavering in how important nurses are to his ability to perform his job efficiently and effectively. When I think back to major medical milestones of my life - giving birth, staying by my father-in-law’s side in the ICU, or receiving long-distance updates as my mother underwent heart surgery - I realize how much power nurses hold in their hands. Nurses administer the doses of medication that sustain patient comfort and survival; they make adjustments on the fly and decide when to escalate for help; they control the emotional well-bring of a patient and his/her family, acting as a twitter-feed for progress updates…and so much more. They have to be error-free, because of the mortal repercussions of their actions.
This book tremendously increased my awareness for what nurses are responsible for, and what they endure. I loved that Shalof reiterates through various anecdotes how the ICU’s emotional trauma osmoses to the mental health of nurses themselves. When I hear nurses laughing together now, catharsis instead of insensitivity comes to mind. There was also a quote (spoken by a doctor) that really crystallized for me what a nurse’s mission is: “We never withdraw care. In certain circumstances, we may withdraw treatment, but never care".
Finally. Shalof relates a number of incidents where patient families insisted on life support for their relatives, even when the body was necrotizing, or organs primed for transplant were wasted on a brain-dead patient. In these scenarios, Shalof and her fellow nurses on ‘Laura’s Line’ advocate for death with dignity, to release the body from painful interventions. I had always held the perspective that '“everything should be done” for my family members, and even for myself, but Shalof has encouraged me to rethink this blanket belief. It is often the desire to relieve personal guilt that drives families to prolong life past the last shred of realistic hope for recovery.
I highly recommend this book to those who want a very readable, thought-provoking look into patient care, narrated by a passionate insider. Shalof’s writing is convincing, well-balanced and unequivocal, and her stories are incredible.