The Nurse's Story

""A Shattering, exhilarating book. A tribute to human dignity and courage."" -Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather ""The first book to really take you behind hospital doors."" - New York Times ""Speaking Up For Nursing. What does the public know - and want to know - about the nursing profession? Nurse-novelist Carol Gino unravels misconceptions and tells 'the nurse's story.'"" - American Journal of Nursing ""So steeped in reality is The Nurse's Story that to call it fiction seems scarcely adequate; the story bristles with details and case histories that only experience could have provided. Teri Daley, the narrator, is grossly underpaid and overworked, burdened with responsibility but little authority, yet often held accountable for the blundering of doctors. In harrowing, sometimes gruesome passages still fresh with pain, Teri ministers to patients so disfigured with cancer or burns that they barely resemble human beings, while other patients are so psychotic, tragically terminal or deformed that only sheer guts and bottomless compassion can see her through the long days and nights. Rocked by her own implosions of grief each time a patient dies, she finds the mundane quality of her own life mocking and barely tolerable."" - Cheryl McCall for People Magazine ""Gritty and honest . . . it has a fierce compassion."" - Martha Lear, Author of HEARTSOUNDS ""The Nurse's Story speaks with honesty, vigor, eloquence and sensitivity to the essentially human daily experience of every nurse, tales that are so intertwined in the mysteries of life and death that they are rarely admitted and heretofore never publicly told even as myth."" -Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N. Professor of Nursing, NYU ""Riveting, wrenching. Few nurse's have experienced the range of cases this dedicated woman describes: cancer, burn unit, emergency ward, birth, brain damage . . . The writer is a vigorous optimistic, caring woman. And she exudes frankness."" -Los Angeles Times ""The Nurse's Story does make one a believer in second chances."" -Denver Post ""She knows the front lines of nursing through and through . . . her stories are almost invariably unsettling. But she is always honest. In public and in private hospitals alike, people die daily in ways we don't want to imagine; and when the rewards no longer compensate for the pain and frustration, tough, caring people like Gino are lost to the profession. A graphic, hard-line testimonial."" -Kirkus Review