Alexandra Robbins' 'The Nurses': Intimate look at the lives of the life-savers
My first real job out of college was working in the public relations department for the health-care system now called Penn Medicine. Whenever I went to the emergency room, I felt as if I were a pebble on the floor of a fast-moving river, with people and patients and doctors rushing past me. Always, though, the nurses directed that flow.
A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital
By Alexandra Robbins
Workman. 464 pp. $24.95
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Reviewed
by Jen A. Miller
My first real job out of college was working in the public relations department for the health-care system now called Penn Medicine. Whenever I went to the emergency room, I felt as if I were a pebble on the floor of a fast-moving river, with people and patients and doctors rushing past me. Always, though, the nurses directed that flow.
In her nonfiction book The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital, Alexandra Robbins gets into the lives of those nurses, and shows how they fit into the health-care ecosystem, including their relationships with one another, their treatment by doctors, and how their jobs affect their personal lives - marriages, children, even sometimes tipping over into painkiller addiction.
The story is told in a round-robin format, alternating among four RNs who work at different hospitals in the same region, from an understaffed urban hospital to an academic teaching hospital. While issues at each one are largely the same - nurses taking on more patients than ever before; harassment by patients and even doctors; the rush that comes with saving lives; the crushing blow of losing a patient; the delicate dance of any inner-office politics - with the difference that here, people's lives are at stake.
Real names are withheld and locations generalized. This sucks a bit of the reality from the story - as if it weren't fact, but just a story based on real life. But it does allow her subjects to be open about their lives without fear of retaliation - especially clear with one nurse who gets hooked on painkillers and continues working in the field after rehab. (Not uncommon: Robbins explains the complex process doctors and nurses must undergo to keep their licenses after rehab.)
Robbins did much the same in Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities and The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. This book steps away, for now, from her reports on young adulthood. She raises issues about our changing health-care world, especially in hospitals where nurses are given more patients per shift because of staff cuts, while hospitals add things like valet parking and luxury rooms.
"Would you rather be bribed during your hospital stay with made-to-order omelets or would you rather be, for example, not dead?" she writes. When seen through the eyes of the nurses in this book, the answer is obvious.