Join us in store to welcome Theresa Brown, RN discussing her new book Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient! This is an in-store, in-person event and is free and open for all to attend! Please RSVP here
New York Times bestselling author Theresa Brown tells a poignant,powerful, and intensely personal story about breast cancer. She brings us along with her from the mammogram that would change her life through her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Despite her training and years of experience as an oncology and hospice nurse, she finds herself continually surprised by the lack of compassion in the medical maze—just as so many of us have. Why is she expected to wait over a long weekend
to hear the results of her cancer tests if they are ready? Where is the empathy from caregivers? Why is she so often left in the dark about procedures and treatments? At times she’s mad at herself for not speaking up and asking for what she needs but knows that being labeled a “difficult” patient could mean she gets worse care.
As she did in her book The Shift, Brown draws us into her work with the unforgettable details of her daily life—the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the frustrated patients—but from her new perch as a patient, she also takes a look back with rare candor at some of her own cases as a nurse and considers what she didn’t know then and what she could have done better.
A must-read for fans of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms, and all of us who have tried to find healing through our health-care system.
About the Author:
Theresa Brown, RN, author of the New York Times bestseller The Shift, has been a contributor to the New York Times. Her writing appears on CNN.com and in the American Journal of Nursing, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has been a guest on MSNBC Live and NPR’s Fresh Air. Her first book was Critical Care, and during what she calls her past life, she received a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She lectures nationally and internationally on issues related to nursing, health care, and end of life.
About the Moderator:
Elizabeth Royal has worked for the Service Employees International Union for almost 18 years, most recently as the Assistant Director for Healthcare Workforce Strategy and Director of the National Nurse Alliance. She holds a BA in Sociology from The College of William and Mary and a Masters in Sociology from Vanderbilt University. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters.