Theresa Brown, AB87, PhD94, had been a nurse for almost a decade when she learned she had breast cancer. She’d even worked in oncology, treating cases far direr than her small and very treatable tumor. With all that experience, she thought she knew what to expect as a cancer patient, as Brown writes in her new memoir Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2022), she had no idea what it’s really like when the life you are trying to save is your own. “My sense of what health care was like as a nurse,” Brown says, “was just wrong.”
the problem, no grievous medical error or cruel remark. Instead, what Brown found was mundane indifference to her suffering. “There was so little kindness, so little compassion, so little organization, so little sense of ‘OK, we’ve got this,’ so little good communication,” she says a nurse, who thought she could fill the gaps in the system by working harder, but as a patient, she saw just how wide and frequent the gaps can be. It’s a problem without an easy solution, but she believes nonprofit hospitals and some form of universal health care coverage would allow for better and more humane care.
Brown was first diagnosed, she assumed someone would sit her down and explain her prognosis and treatment options—“you know, like in a movie or a TV show, people get a cancer diagnosis. Yeah, that never happened. And I don’t know that it does.”
an early sign of troubles to come: throughout her treatment, Brown found herself having to coordinate her complex treatment and jockey for attention in an overburdened system. She tried to be the ideal patient—an agreeable and passive vessel for her providers’ wisdom—because she knew from experience that easy patients tend to get the best care. But in her fear and exhaustion, she also became an occasional squeaky wheel, taking to Twitter to complain about delayed mammogram results and trying to use personal connections to get an earlier appointment with a medical oncologist.
Brown’s most personal book, but it carries forward themes she explores in her first two, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between (HarperCollins Publishers, 2010) and The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2015). In these and her frequent contributions to the New York Times, Brown writes about medicine as a human endeavor prone to human failings: ego, inattention, pettiness. Yet she never loses sight of the potential for good care to heal patients' physical and mental
health care has made her an advocate for all kinds of improvements to it, both systemic and cultural. In 2009, shortly before the Affordable Care Act was introduced to Congress, Brown wrote an article about one of her leukemia patients, a man in his 60s, who spent the last three months of his life worried about the medical debt he would leave his wife.
“My patient thought he had planned well for his health care needs,” she wrote. “He just never thought he would wake up one day with a leukemia diagnosis. But which of us does? And that’s why we need health care reform.” That piece earned Brown an invitation to the White House to meet President Barack Obama, who quoted from her article in a speech at a nurses’ event supporting health care reform.
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