Oh I loved this little book. I read it after reading Amanda’s memoir (and I am still working on a review, promise! It’s turned in to more of a reflective journal and we all know how fun those were to write in nursing school. But I want and need to write it so I will!) Nurse Periwinkle, although separated from us by 150 years, experienced many things that are all to familiar to modern nurses, such as prematurely being thrust in to being in charge of a ward, having someone die right away, wanting the exciting patients, the realizing what that entails and then not waiting the sick patients anymore. And how many of us can relate to being told that you’re “there to work, not wonder or weep; so i corked up my feelings and returned to the path of duty.” Wait until later to find a supply closet to cry in. Her visceral response and disgust about finding a Rebel in her ward is something we saw a lot this pandemic. However, at the end of the day, your patient is a person in a bed who needs nursing care and you have a duty to care for him in the best way that you can, whether he’s a jerk, criminal, noncompliant, or any combination thereof. I get the moral distress and frustration but we have a code of ethics and a professional responsibility to do better (and I know that nursing as a profession didn’t exist back them, but today’s nurses should know that).

Her description of the “fearsome beverage” that is hospital coffee shows that even that hasn’t changed, describing it ad “mud soup, scalding hot, guiltless of cream, rich in an all-pervading flavor of molasses, scorch, and tin pot.” If that’s not a spot-on description of hospital coffee to this day, I don’t know what is.

A Night Shift nurse myself, I feel a solidarity with Nurse Periwinkle dealing with being understaffed on the Night Shift and having to deal with three simultaneous crises. Also, the Doctor making the nurse break bad news and deal with the consequences is all too familiar. Like today, the windows don’t open (except for the one with the “compound fractures” that’s drafty), there are smells (how often do we anoint the room with peppermint oil) and after visiting the cleaner, better equipped hospital (or hear that the travel nurse is making 11k/week) you seriously re-evaluate your life choices.

Unlike Amanda’s book, “Everybody Just Breathe: a Covid nurse’s memoir of stamina and swear words” there are no swear words in this book. However, I think that if swear words were a viable option, she would have sprinkled them in liberally. Just read this and tell me she wouldn’t have unleashed a barrage of fucks if she could: “If a look could annihilate, Francis Saucebox would have ceased to exist; but it couldn’t; therefore, he yet lives, aggravate some unhappy woman’s soul, and wax fat in some equally congenial situation.”

Finally, holy smokes does this paragraph resonate: “Constant complaints were being made of incompetent attendants, and some dozen women did double duty, then were blamed for breaking down. If any hospital director fancies this a good economical arrangement, allow one used-up nurse to tell him it isn’t, and beg him to spare the sisterhood, who sometimes in their sympathy, forget that they are mortal, and run the risk of being made immortal, sooner than is agreeable to their mortal friends.” Somebody send Nurse Periwinkle to the Joint Commission headquarters with Nurse Blake, then send her up to the C-suite of every hospital! But instead we’ll get federal legislation proposed to limit how much we can earn, judges in Wisconsin issuing emergency injunctions saying that you’re not allowed to quit your job, and then get thrown in jail for systemic failures for good measure. However, like Nurse Periwinkle, the “stern and salutary” lessons of being an ICU nurse have indeed deepened my faith in God and myself, and I guess I’ll keep it up as long as my back holds out.