Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front

As the healthcare debate rages on with the growth of the HMO industry, nurses quietly continue to provide the day-to-day grit and deeply-felt passion that hold the healing profession together. Within these remarkable women and men are poignant, outrageous stories drawn from the edge of life. But fear of career backlash and reprisals have made them reluctant to talk to outsiders about their experience. Now Echo Heron, New York Times bestselling author of Intensive Care, draws truths far stranger than fiction out of her colleagues--and allows the nurses to speak to us in their own words.

Ranging from inspiring to tragic to outrageously funny, these narratives are real life medical dramas as experienced by nurses across the country--each practicing in a variety of specialties, including cardiac care, labor and delivery, burns, the ER--even a nurse who works in dolphin care.

Tending Lives portrays a penitentiary nurse responsible for orchestrating a murderer's execution; a stroke victim who rose out of his depression when his nurses began telling him jokes; and, perhaps the most riveting testimony, the moment-by-moment memories of several nurses who served in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing--gripping accounts that give us new perspectives on the horror and heroism of that nightmare day.

Pediatric nurses, psychiatric nurses, home-care nurses, intensive care nurses--all with distinct voices and unique stories to tell. Filled with both tears and laughter, and charged with the issues that afflict nursing care today, Tending Lives is a gripping, moving, inspiring book, a fitting tribute to a noble profession.

Author and nurse Echo Heron has written passionately and painfully about her own career in nursing. Now she turns to fellow nurses whose voices, added to her own, give an extraordinary account of what it means to be a nurse.

Moment-by-moment memories of nurses at the Oklahoma City bombing... stories from a nurse on a movie set... an account from a penitentiary nurse responsible for orchestrating a murderer's execution ... these and many other tales give new perspective to the heroism, horror — even humor — of a nurse's life.

Echo Heron is the author of the bestselling Intensive Care: The Story of a Nurse, Conditional Critical: The Story of a Nurse Continues, the novel, Mercy, and the medical thriller, Pulse. She was a critical-care nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area for seventeen years and is a spokesperson for nurses and patient's rights. Ms. Heron and her cat Mooshie currently reside in California.