Angels With Stethoscopes
A Surprising, Compelling Journey Into The Heart and Work of an RN
by
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Johns’ Eyes
A short story
Looking around the conference room at them, all their faces sagged, weighed down with shock, grief and despair. Hopelessness wafted in the air like a thick dark mist.
His sister, bearing her heartache with quiet dignity, grappling with the idea that her younger brother was going to die today ; Johns’ brother, wobbling on the precipice of bereavement, his body rocking in a tight arc back and forth on the couch, hands clasped tight in a white-knuckled lock, eyes fixed on some focus the floor held. John’s Dad, standing against the wall, finding sitting down too much activity to ask of him, his father’s heart too filled with anguish to allow attendance to everyday tasks. John’s wife, young and pretty features looking suddenly old, having just learned she has been infected with a death sentence, an inadvertently given curse from her HIV+ and unfortunately promiscuous husband who lay fighting for his life only a few rooms away. Undoubtedly she thought to herself “This is not what I signed up for…this is not how its’ supposed to be…my babies…who will care for them ?? For better or worse, but does the “worse” mean I must die, too ??…” It was all there on her face, easily read by anyone looking at her.
Finally, there was John’s Mother. Pale face tight and rigidly set into an expression of anger, seeing all of us in this Ethics Committee meeting as criminals. Convinced our sole purpose was to kill her boy. She has not been able to accept her son sought out his patient killer through his own carelessness. Mom was determined to blame somebody.
As we frail humans often do in crisis, she called upon God to champion her cause. She clasped a Bible to her chest, wielding it now and then as if it were Excalibur.
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About the Book
How do Nurses really feel about their work? Do they become distant and uninvolved with pain and suffering to protect themselves from self-destruction over the years? Do they genuinely care what happens to their patients or is it merely a calloused race to the finish line of quitting time each shift? Any reader who has laid in a hospital bed or had a loved one hospitalized will be able to immediately relate to this book and it’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the events unfolding in the lives of both patients and their primary caregivers, the Nursing staff. There are surprises; this is not a pink, warm fuzzy diary but a visceral accounting of the true struggle to maintain humanity and compassion in an environment that runs the risk of becoming immune to it’s own drama. The pieces are delivered in the format of often graphic prose and poetry and forward the unexpected combination of pathos and hope. Expect to need tissues as a reading aid. This is a book not only for the lay public but for the health care professions as well; it normalizes the extraordinary experiences of those whose work it is to sustain and save life, whose charge is to heal and to help. There is reassurance in each line of these pages and it should be required reading for all nursing students and health care professionals in addition to being a primer for all those whose life leads them through illness, either in a hospital bed or beside it.
About the Author
At age 36 with six children in tow, Susi Franco loaded up a tiny U-Haul with the bare necessities, leaving her abusive husband a letter of explanation and moved almost a thousand miles away to attend Nursing College. She and her children would stay in a womens’ shelter, a housing project and finally a trailer, enduring harsh privation & sacrifice so she could earn her Nursing Degree and shape a new life for her children and herself.
Never expecting the encounter with Life and Death on such a personal level or the poignant events with patients whose care she was given, her observations led her to begin scrawling notes on scrap paper and old order sheets, filling notebooks to capture the moments and preserve them, feeling these were once in a lifetime events deserving acknowledgement. Raw with emotion at times, brimming with palpable drama, these vignettes are tender and heart-rending accounts of the true events unfolding in the career and life of a Registered Nurse.
Susi spent the first half of her life in the arts performing in music; circumstances of single parenthood forced her to pursue securing a more reliable method of raising her brood alone; Nursing became that vehicle. Spanning her career from the beginning, her book chronicles the unwavering commitment of the discipline of Nursing.
Susi kept extensive journals throughout childhood into her adult life , has been nationally published in the Orange Willow Review and online in various venues. Her writing has been the subject of newspaper stories and a cable tv show; also featured in “The Tails of the Village Idiot” by Nathan Hutnak.
Now disability retired & residing near the ocean in her beloved