Book picks similar to
Nursing Ethics in Everyday Practice by Connie M. Ulrich
nursing
healthcare
memoirs
nursing-and-leadership
Heart of Iron: My Journey from Transplant Patient to Ironman Triathlete
Kyle Garlett - 2011
Not just about his health crisis but also about forging a remarkable life around cancer and his career as a sportwriter, the amazing friends and family who supported him, and finding love. After five and half years on the organ transplant waiting list then being gifted with a new heart, Kyle embarks on a challenge of his own making: to compete in the Ironman Triathlon, in which he competed not once but twice. His miraculous recovery and athleticism are recounted, along with the story of how he became an Olympic torch bearer, a devoted Lymphoma & Leukemia Society spokesperson, a motivational speaker, and an author. Heart of Iron is an invaluable companion for those affected by cancer and a breathtaking memoir about one man’s unstoppable spirit and success against all odds.
Trafficked: Two Sisters Lost
Lois Kenna Tripodi - 2014
"Trafficked: Two Sisters Lost," is the story of two vulnerable young sisters, separated from each other, sexually exploited, suffering from inhumane living conditions, and confronted daily with physical and emotional abuse. Erin, a part-time journalist with a weekly newspaper in the San Diego area, is assigned a task to write a series of articles about the brutal industry of human trafficking that, depending on the source, is the second or third most profitable criminal activity in the world. In doing so, she not only becomes aware of the magnitude of the problem, but becomes deeply involved in the efforts to rescue and reunite the two lost sisters. Lois Kenna Tripodi graduated from Boston University with a degree in Sociology, is a Licensed Certified Social Worker, and has received alcoholism and drug substance abuse training from Rutgers University. She holds certificates from California and New Hampshire in "Domestic Violence Support Services" and from the University of New Hampshire in "Social Work Counseling." In addition, she has participated in workshops at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in Montecito, California. A native-born New Hampshire resident, she has served in the NH House of Representatives, District 8, Hillsborough. In addition to supervising and counseling battered women in domestic violence support shelters, she was a member of the Oceanside, California, Crisis Intervention and Sexual Assault Response Team (SART). She currently resides in New Hampshire with her husband. She is the author of one previous novel, "To Take Shelter."
Silent Violence
D.M. Samson - 2008
He had secured a job replacing the outgoing foreman of a secluded farm near Riyadh. Almost two years later she would return. Alone. Broken. In Silent Violence she tells us of her journey: a long downward spiral. From the first inklings of things not being right, a pet killer in the expatriate compound, clandestine excursions by the farm crew, through to the rising hysteria within the expatriate community, then the killings at the farm, the ensuing imprisonment, moral deterioration, government procrastination and eventual deliverance.
Polish Girl In Pursuit of the English Dream: INTIMATE & INSPIRING TRUE STORY ON THE JOURNEY TO ENLIGHTENMENT
Monika Wiśniewska - 2018
Finding the SECRET to a happy, peaceful life in self-love was worth the 13- year journey in a foreign country because without it, I may have never found THAT SECRET. Life is about the choices we make. Each choice decides about our destiny. WE are in charge of our destiny, especially when it comes to love and relationships...’Author's dream to live in England came true in 2004 but when she suddenly lost most of her belongings, health, career, money, home and her soulmate, she decided to share the story which led to this tragic moment. Will she find the courage, resilience and determination to start her life abroad all over? Will she make the right choices that life presents her with? How will she deal with poverty, pain, homelessness and betrayals whilst looking for love?Travel to around fifty European locations, fall in love, have your heart broken, fall in love again and find strength to keep going but never, ever give up on life! It truly is a brave record of one woman's relationships and heartbreaks, dealing with depression in the wake of Brexit and her life as a newly named 'immigrant' or simply an EU citizen. Are you truly ready for a journey to feel UNCONDITIONAL LOVE together with one brave 'Polish Girl' ? REVIEW FROM THE DAILY BRUNCH:THE MOST INSPIRING BOOK ON LOVE!'For me, ‘Polish Girl; In Pursuit of the English Dream’ is a true masterpiece of reflections on love and life, making me want to recommend it to everyone who is ready to set off on their own spiritual journey to find out more about their own soul together with one courageous, unique and life-loving Polish girl. I can guarantee that you will relate to at least one thing in her life story, if not a few. I wish there were more stories like this published which millions of people can so easily relate to. After all, the spiritual journey is what we are all here for. If we cannot evolve and learn from the past to have a better future, is life really worth living?'
Zuzu's Petals: A True Story of Second Chances
Lauren Ward Larsen - 2010
Shortly after she entered the ninth month of what had been an easy pregnancy, her husband, Jeff, followed a sudden and inexplicable urge to bring her flowers in the middle of a busy workday. Within hours of his visit, their lives would change forever.The rapid onset of a pregnancy-related disorder nearly claimed the lives of both Lauren and her baby. After more than a month in intensive care, and with years of recovery work ahead of her, Lauren was left with the question: What now? Amidst the wreckage of her near-fatal illness, an opportunity emerged—the chance to rebuild a different life, one that was more personally meaningful and fulfilling. With absolute clarity about their limited time on earth, Lauren and Jeff changed their priorities, their careers, their lifestyle, and even where they lived.As her physical strength grew, so too did Lauren’s understanding of just how many people — nurses, doctors, friends, family, and anonymous blood donors — had contributed to giving her a second chance in life. An overwhelming sense of gratitude emerged and found expression through her fundraising campaigns and national speaking tour. And along the way, Lauren became a shamelessly proud mother, who sought to live as joyfully as possible no matter the circumstances.At times heartbreaking, at times laugh-out-loud funny, Zuzu’s Petals is a story about human resilience, living authentically, and the power of turning gratitude into action.
God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine
Victoria Sweet - 2012
Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves-"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for body and soul.
Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
Pauline W. Chen - 2006
What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure.From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.
On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency
Emily R. Transue - 2004
Having studied at Yale and Dartmouth, Dr. Emily Transue arrives in Seattle to start her internship in Internal Medicine just after graduating from medical school. This series of loosely interconnected scenes from the author's medical training concludes her residency three years later.During her first week as a student on the medical wards, Dr. Transue watched someone come into the emergency room in cardiac arrest and die. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before-it was a long way from books and labs. So she began to record her experiences as she gained confidence putting her book knowledge to work.The stories focus on the patients Dr. Transue encountered in the hospital, ER and clinic; some are funny and others tragic. They range in scope from brief interactions in the clinic to prolonged relationships during hospitalization. There is a man newly diagnosed with lung cancer who is lyrical about his life on a sunny island far away, and a woman, just released from a breathing machine after nearly dying, who sits up and demands a cup of coffee.Though the book has a great deal of medical content, the focus is more on the stories of the patients' lives and illnesses and the relationships that developed between the patients and the author, and the way both parties grew in the course of these experiences.Along the way, the book describes the life of a resident physician and reflects on the way the medical system treats both its patients and doctors. On Call provides a window into the experience of patients at critical junctures in life and into the author's own experience as a new member of the medical profession.
The House of Hope and Fear: Life in a Big City Hospital
Audrey Young - 2007
Opening with the view of an idealistic young doctor entering her first post-graduate job at the local county hospital, The House of Hope and Fear explores not only the personal journey of one doctor's life and career, but also examines the health care system as a whole. The county hospital setting provides Audrey Young with a second education. With clear, eloquent text, the author chronicles attempts made to treat those tossed aside by society along with the personal and ideological shifts that accompany this daunting task. All of the hospital politics are detailed in a gripping account of the hospital's inner workings, and a human face is expertly given to the health care crisis in America.
Mayhem 337: Memoir of a Combat Advisor in Afghanistan
Chad Rickard - 2019
He was a seasoned infantryman and senior Army NCO with a burning desire to deploy to Afghanistan and join the fight against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces bent on keeping American influence out of the Middle East. Like many Americans Chad felt personally stricken by the attacks on 9/11 and he yearned to take part in his Nation's retaliation for the atrocities planned within the sanctity of Afghanistan's borders. When the opportunity arose to deploy as a Combat Advisor to an Afghan Infantry Battalion he seized the opportunity and headed to Fort Riley, Kansas to attend U.S. Army Combat Advisor School. After months of intensive training in Afghan customs, culture and language in addition to tactical training on the direction of close air support and artillery Rickard was dropped into a hotbed of action in Afghanistan's Khost Province. In Khost, former home to one of Osama Bin Laden's largest terror training camps, Rickard's team went toe to toe with Haqqani Taliban on numerous occasions, often leaving a staggering body count in their wake. In Mayhem 337, Rickard powerfully recounts his experiences during a nine month period of intense combat deep in the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan. His graphic account guides you through intense combat from the streets of Khost City, to deadly mountain warfare while based at an austere combat outpost. He vividly describes the sights and sounds of battle as well as the heartbreaking aftermath of fallen comrades. From IED laden roads to air assault missions and hostage standoffs, Rickard's story leaves nothing to the imagination. His riveting memoir brings recognition and honor to the Embedded Transition Team legacy that is but a footnote in U.S. military history.
A Matter of Life and Death: Courage, compassion and the fight against coronavirus - a palliative care nurse's story
Kelly Critcher - 2021
Day by day, wards were being cleared to make way for Covid-positive patients. Things were getting worse by the day. For the first time in my nursing career, I felt scared.As a palliative care nurse, it is Kelly Critcher's job to look death in the eye - to save a patient while the fight can still be won, and confront death with grace and kindness when it can't.In early 2020, everything changed for nurses on the NHS frontline. Working on Covid wards and the High Dependency Unit, Kelly spent the height of the coronavirus crisis at Northwick Park hospital - perhaps the UK hospital most deeply ravaged by the illness.She, and many others like her, battled tirelessly in a critical care unit pushed to breaking point, delivering the bad news and fighting the good fight, day-in, day-out, throughout the gravest test our health service has faced since its inception.Kelly's story weaves together her raw, emotional diaries from the COVID frontline with a broader reflection on the truths about a life spent caught between battling for her patients' lives and helping them face down death with courage and compassion. Bringing together the enormity of the last twelve months - and the scars it will leave - this is a book for our times.
The Miraculous Torpedo Squadron by Jūzõ Mori
Jūzõ Mori - 2015
Never before translated into English, this book gives a vivid depiction of what it was like to fly and fight for the IJN. Contents include the author's youth in pre-war Japan, joining the navy and training to become a pilot, and his combat experiences during the war. Mori flew first in China, then took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Wake Island, the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian operations, the battle of Midway and the battle for Guadalcanal. This is a rare opportunity to view the war through the eyes of one of our opponents in his own words. Filled with hitherto unrevealed details about the most significant battles of the war, this book is a must read for those interested in the history of the Pacific War. Nick Voge spent many years working as a translator in Japan and is also a commercial pilot flying for a small Hawaiian airline. He is thus uniquely qualified to translate this epic story into English.
KERI 2: The Original Child Abuse True Story (Child Abuse True Stories)
Kat Ward - 2011
Even kids who grow up in happy, loving households encounter all manner of problems during adolescence. But children who were abused, raped, bullied, mistreated or neglected during their earliest years, face the transition at an even greater disadvantage. For they not only come completely ill-prepared, but also badly scarred, and often still licking the wounds from their childhoods. This second volume of Kat Ward’s sensational autobiography covers her plight as she grew in stature, and began to challenge the authority structures that had ruled over her young life so cruelly up until that point. It was a desperate rebellion in true teen spirit, but even with all the will in the world, she was still a child in a world full of grown-ups. And if there’s one thing an abuser knows all too well, it’s how to wield their power over the powerless… DISCLAIMER: This is a true story of child abuse. Reader discretion is advised.
Baby Doctor
Perri Klass - 1992
Now, writing with her distinctive intelligence, wit, and insight, she chronicles her rite of passage from intern to doctor.rtising.
DIRTY WHITE BOY: One Addict's Lifelong Battle Against Heroin Addiction
Frank Ruhl Peterson - 2014
My narrative covers many issues which increasingly threaten all classes of modern day society. Principle among these is the heartbreak of Addiction, and the collateral devastation it exacts in all its’ forms. Regrettably, true appreciation of addiction’s desperate landscape, too often requires one’s intimate personal involvement with its twisted and insidious nature. Despite this grim caveat, a powerfully descriptive account can nevertheless provide some measure of protective awareness. With this in mind, please consider some of the issues discussed in my story: · Raised primarily by an abusive, unemployed, alcoholic step-father, and a mother more concerned with maintaining her tenuous relationship than protecting her children. · My gradual descent into the drug-culture of the 1960’s, culminating in Heroin use at 15, and addiction by 16 years of age. · Forcible eviction from my home by my stepfather at age 16; the grueling adaptation to street-life and homelessness, while supporting a significant drug habit. · Surviving as a frightened white teenager in Spanish Harlem; forced to live in abandoned buildings (which doubled as “Shooting Galleries”), Central Park, the Subways (during winter), stairwells or boiler-rooms. · Ejection from High School after being caught shooting Heroin in the school bathroom. · My criminal involvement and subsequent arrests, resulting in jail time, jumping parole, and interstate flight to avoid prosecution. · My decision to begin Methadone Maintenance. · My mysterious “Epiphany”, providing incentive for my detox, and subsequent devotion to Physical Fitness. · Falsifying documents to enter College without ever achieving a GED or Diploma. · Gaining early admission to Medical School, with neither a College Degree nor High School Diploma. · Relapse into narcotic addiction following surgery during my 3rd year of Medical School. · Completing Internship and gaining acceptance to an Anesthesiology Residency while maintaining a narcotics habit. · Entry into treatment following my 1st year of Residency; my re-entry into another Anesthesia Residency. · Relapse after completing Residency, while performing 3rd world medicine; taking a position at a hospital in Penn. · My arrest for narcotic diversion; my imprisonment which ultimately totaled 34 months, and the loss of my Medical License. · Becoming the subject of a 20/20 television broadcast which was intentionally twisted and malevolently distorted through disingenuous editing. · The years following the loss of my profession. My depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and subsequent suicide attempts; my eventual acceptance of life’s disparate and capricious nature, and how life, and our success within it, is defined simply by our own perspective. DIRTY WHITE BOY avidly supports and encourages the belief that no matter how desperate our current life appears, we all have the power to rise above it. Those currently struggling with personal demons need to realize their future is malleable by design, not immutable or cast in stone. It is also a cautionary tale warning that success comes hand-in-hand with inherent temptations. Arrogance and conceit are equally as addictive as any narcotic; to forget our past quite often means we are destined to repeat it.