Additional information
by Carol Gino (Author)
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - A powerful true story originally published by Simon & Schuster, serialized nationwide, and adapted into a screenplay by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.
Teri Daley is a new nurse with a genuine calling to help others, but nothing in nursing school prepared her for the challenges of nurse-patient relations, hospital bureaucracy, the mystery of healing, or the raw grief of unpredictable mortality.
Based on Gino's own years in critical care and intensive care units, this fictionalized nurse memoir takes you behind the scenes of big-city hospital wards where life-and-death decisions are made in seconds.
- How can she help the family of a terminally ill patient when the doctor can do nothing more?
- What can she do for a 10-year-old burn victim for whom most of consciousness is pain?
- How does she convince the doctor of her intuition that the patient cannot survive major surgery at a given time?
- And how can she leave all of this behind at the end of her twelve-hour shift?
If you've ever been moved by real-life nurse memoirs like The Shift, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital, or The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story, this novel will feel like finally hearing your own story told out loud.
"The first book to really take you behind hospital doors." - New York Times
"So steeped in reality...that to call it fiction seems scarcely adequate." - People
"The most shattering and exhilarating book on nursing ever written." - Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather
"Belongs on the shelf of every nursing school, every hospital, and every public library in the country." - Midwest Book Review
"Riveting, wrenching...Few nurses have experienced the range of cases this dedicated woman describes. The writer is a vigorous, optimistic, caring woman-and she exudes frankness." - Los Angeles Times
From the book
"I walked back into her room and closed the door behind me. I turned off the alarm on the respirator, detached her and started blindly to do her dressings. I refused to look at the monitor. And then, for the first time, I held her small body tight against me. I hugged her, rocking. After I laid her down and fixed her bed, I straightened the entire room. Finally, I looked at the monitor. Straight line.
I opened the chart to see what the doctor had written. It read: 'Patient died while on respirator. Pronounced dead at 6:45 A.M.'"
Author's Note
I was a nurse for more than thirty years-in emergency rooms, burn units, ICU, pediatrics, hospice, psyche wards, and home healthcare-and every scene in this book is drawn from the real patients and families I cared for. To protect their privacy, I changed names and details. But the babies I kept vigil over, the families I had to tell the truth to, and the moments when I knew in my bones what a chart could never say-and at times had to put my job on the line to give my patient a fighting chance-are exactly as I lived them. These stories grew out of the lives of patients and colleagues that have never left my heart. Their real names and faces, I will never forget.
