Healing Words: A Critical Care Book Club
I was always a reader. The days of the Scholastic book fair during elementary school were among my favorites. Although it doesn’t appear in my CV, my first job was working in the school store. With every shift I worked, the smell of blank sheets of paper, the thrill of a pencil awaiting to be sharpened to that perfect point, or the ballpoint and ink pens in a rainbow of colors stole my hard-earned quarters.
‘Is it on the NCLEX?’
But reading novels during nursing school was just plain hard. There were competing priorities, a brain brimming with vital information, and sheer exhaustion at the end of the day. Assigned readings presented an overwhelming amount of contextual information. And then there was the constant attention to evidence, protocols, and clinical practice guidelines. The “need to know” information took priority; the sheer pleasure of losing oneself in a story—whether novel or memoir—was lost.
During my senior year, in an advanced illness course, my professors assigned a novel-style memoir, Bed Number Ten by Sue Baier. To this day, I can remember the reactions to the assignment: “A book? Who has time for that?” “Are we going to be tested on this book?”
Or, most importantly: “Is it on the NCLEX?”
As is our tradition in the final weeks of the calendar year, we’d like to share the 10 most popular AJN blog posts of 2017. Most of these posts are by nurses who somehow find time to write in the midst of busy nursing and personal lives. One or two are by AJN editors. Not all, but most, are written by nurses.