
This book is a memoir by a working nurse. As a child, the author dreams of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. She idolizes Clara Barton, Kateri Tekakwitha, and Molly Pitcher, whose biographies she reads and rereads. But by the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry. This work details her life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city's first AIDS wards. In this memoir, she brings a poet's sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death.
Publisher:
Minneapolis : Graywolf Press, c2011.
ISBN:
9781555975906
1555975909
1555975909
Characteristics:
x, 212 p. ;,21 cm.


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Add a CommentAn interesting read about a woman who seemed not to take the easy way but certainly went "The Road Less Travelled"
Medical and Oncology nursing in the hospital setting are demanding.Nursing at the beginning of the Aids epidemic very challenging.Later delivering health care in a shelter for the homeless. Mary Jane Nealon recounts these challenges brilliantly.
Not an easy read,but for me very worthwhile.