There’s a moment Theresa Brown keeps revisiting in her book “Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient.” It comes in a hospital, minutes after scans have revealed she likely has breast cancer. She’s distraught, but still must schedule a biopsy. She waits by the registration desk. For a while. Finally, at precisely 3 p.m., the scheduler’s receptionist tells Brown, “She leaves at 3. You just missed her.”
Brown is furious. What might have been a minor inconvenience had now compounded her considerable stress. Worse, medical professionals regarded her plight with casual indifference. In Brown’s searching account of her experience as a cancer patient, the incident becomes symbolic of what she calls “the inhumanity of the system” and the need for systemic change.
It’s a critique she’s well qualified to make. Theresa Brown, who lives in Pittsburgh, is an English professor-turned-registered nurse-turned-author of nonfiction books about nursing. “The Shift” was a bestseller; Brown also writes for news outlets and speaks internationally about health care.
Algonquin Books ($27.95)
“Healing” covers from her diagnosis to a few years after radiation, and is interspersed with stories from her (mostly) pre-diagnosis life as a nurse. Each of the 39 chapters is like a short essay built around an anecdote or two, or a slice of time. So one of her pre-diagnosis shifts dealing with an angry 19-year-old cancer patient and his mother becomes a mirror through which she sees her own aggravations as a patient.
Brown was a hospice nurse who had once worked on an oncology ward, yet she is still surprised by what she goes through. Her instinctive desire to be an “ideal patient” – compliant, uncomplaining – often butts against her need for, you know, medical care from harried or even callous health-care workers. Her professional nurse’s belief she is invulnerable to disease ruptures.
But Brown also re-evaluates her own nursing work, writing:
“I never thought I would write a book about my breasts (or specifically my right breast). The subject of breast cancer feels more revealing, in a way, that talking about my fear of death, my unexpected rage, and my new-found awareness of how often I failed, as a nurse, to fully appreciate how burdened my patients were by their illnesses.”
While her writing style is a bit op-edish at times, Brown ranges pretty widely, drawing on commentators from Foucault and Audre Lorde to Betty Rollins (“First, You Cry”) and Susan Sontag (“Illness as Metaphor”). In a couple of feisty chapters, she takes on the unbearable pinkness of breast-cancer awareness campaigns, the questionable metaphors associated with cancer – how can cancer be “invasive” when, in some sense, it consists of your own (albeit rogue) cells? – and the cult of positive thinking around deadly diseases.
Compared to many people’s cancer experience, Brown acknowledges, hers wasn’t so bad.
Her husband is a University of Pittsburgh professor, her three children are grown. Her cancer is slow-moving, and readily treatable. She can afford to take off nursing for a year and a half, and her radiation goes well enough that she bikes to most of her treatments (including a homeward-bound uphill through Schenley Park). And she repeatedly emphasizes that poor and nonwhite people in the U.S. routinely suffer worse treatment – and worse health outcomes – than the white and affluent.
Nonetheless, Brown argues, her experience was much rougher than it had to be. While she did receive some excellent care from a number of thoughtful people, she still feels the stress of receiving inadequate information about the whole process.
It’s only toward the book’s end that Brown explicitly indicts “the inhumanity of the system” and judges for-profit health care the wrong model. (Statistics indicate that the U.S. spends more on health care per capita than any other developed country while getting the worst population-wide outcomes.)
She notes how inadequate staffing stresses both care-givers and patients. And at one point, she cites research suggesting the practical value of “caring” – studies showing that patients intentionally shown even minimal amounts of compassion report less pain, and need less pain medication. Like most of “Healing,” it’s interesting in itself and something to build on.
Bill O’Driscoll is a Pittsburgh-based journalist and arts reporter for 90.5 WESA-FM.
First Published: May 24, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
