The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives

by Theresa Brown

Home is a vaccine against the stresses of nursing.

You don’t always know because what goes on inside human bodies can be hidden and subtle. This job would be easier if there weren’t such a narrow divide between being the canary in the coal mine and Chicken Little.

That’s the hard thing about empathy—even people with an abundance of it can run out.

“Work is love made visible. And what is it to work with love?” the poet Khalil Gibran wrote.

Smart, hard-working people gather data, ponder for however long they’ve got, and then act. Time is always of the essence.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” the poet Milton said. It’s a line I often hear in my head at work, where standing and waiting can be the best service we offer.

The miracle of oncology is that patients confront their own possible death, and move on.

Because Beth’s daughters are twins, like mine, the loss of one might be irrecoverable for the other. That person has been with you, literally, since the very beginning of both your lives. Having twins

“If we could know the future our jobs would be a lot easier.”