Intensive Care

Description for INTENSIVE CARE: THE STORY OF A NURSE by Echo Heron:

"I turned away, unwilling to dispel the intimacy of the moment. It was almost frightening when I thought of how close people allowed themselves to be with us; we were given such easy access to their souls. We were like housekeepers given the keys to every room and finding th eskeletons and long-hidden cobwebs no one else ever saw."

Passionately and eloquently told, INTENSIVE CARE is the moving and personal account of a nurse's life: from training to practice to burnout---and beyond...

Echo Heron, a ten-year veteran of the coronary care unit and the emergency room of a major San Francisco Bay Area hospital, immerses us in her fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately, triumphant world of nursing, a world in which life-and-death decisions are made on a minute-by-minute basis. From the idealistic twenty-six-year-old student nurse fainting dead away over giving her first injection to the mature and dangerously close-to-cynical R.N. easing the last dying hours of a beloved cancer victim (and realizing that medicine still has the ability to move her deeply), INTENSIVE CARE is free admission to an emotional roller-coaster ride where sometimes a terrific sense of humor and an indomitable spirit pull you through---and sometimes they just aren't enough.

Here is a true story of raw power and touching introspection that could only be told by the star of every patient's greatest real-life drama. Filled with warmth, wit, dynamic gritty detail, and piercing insight, INTENSIVE CARE is absorbing, compelling, and utterly unforgettable.