What is it like when someone who works in health care becomes a patient? Two new books, one written by an intensive care nurse, the other by a health policy analyst and patient advocate, provide personal narratives of going under the knife. One story goes well and the other does not.
Tilda Shalof, author of A Nurse’s Story: Life, Death and In-Between in an Intensive Care Unit, learns by accident at a very young age that she has a defective aortic valve and could “drop dead at any time.” With the experience of caring for a depressive mother and ill father and with a healthy dose of denial, she becomes a highly specialized ICU nurse. She marries, has two children and loves her work. Shalof is a born storyteller and weaves in threads of moving encounters with patients as she explains in Opening My Heart: A Journey from Nurse to Patient and Back Again how her own leaky valve catches up with her.
“I’ll admit it,” she writes, “I’m an adrenaline...
Allan Peterkin, is a Toronto doctor and the author of twelve books for adults and children. He is a founding editor of Ars Medica — A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities, a senior fellow at Massey College and head of the Program in Health, Arts and Humanities at the University of Toronto.
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