Patient Care Is Wrenching: A Psychiatrist, a Nurse and a Doctor Bare All – The New York Times

Case a British nurse, spoken-word artist and writer whose poem Nursing the Nation went viral several years ago explains how hospitals assess critically ill patients with the ABCDE technique, checking their airway, breathing, circulation, disability and exposure. She divides How to Treat People into the same sections, illustrating what each term means on its most basic human level by dipping in and out of anecdotes from her training and her years on a cardiac unit.

Of breathing, Case writes, The feel of breath on the fine, peach-skin hairs of my cheek would tell me if this person were still living; sometimes the last breaths come so slow, the only way of catching them is to come in cheek-close and wait for the feel of them. She spends an entire shift caring for a dying patient, a man with no friends or family, comforting him as his breathing grows shallow and raspy. After he dies, she washes him and gently wraps him in a shroud. Only then does she break, heading for the labor and delivery ward where her sister, Daisy, works: I fell into her arms, describing in unintelligible gulps how I had just watched a man die. Daisy comforts her, and as Case is leaving, she heard the screams of a woman in the final stages of labor in a nearby room, followed by the wet cry of her newborn bringing its head to the brim, breaking the surface.

Threaded through the stories of patients is that of Cases father, who suffers a stroke, needs emergency heart surgery and ends up on her cardiac ward. His recovery is difficult, and as Case writes about it, she illuminates the fascinating and never-ending loop of care in a hospital: Doctors and nurses tend to their charges for hours, often without a break, then hand them over to the next shift, and on and on and on, shuttling patients as best they can through a balky, imperfect health care system.

SEVEN SIGNS OF LIFEUnforgettable Stories From an Intensive Care DoctorBy Aoife Abbey274 pp. Arcade. $24.99.

I look after people who are at the extreme fringes of existence, Abbey, an Irish intensive-care doctor, writes. Her patients, if they recover, frequently have no memory of her, even if she has spent weeks or months caring for them: They are critically ill, temporarily dwelling in another place: sedated and mechanically ventilated.

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Patient Care Is Wrenching: A Psychiatrist, a Nurse and a Doctor Bare All - The New York Times