The photograph for the cover was taken by noted Rhode Island photographer Danielle Dasta, www.dastavisuals.com

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 been hospitalized or had a loved one hospitalized with severe illness will be able to immediately relate to this book and it’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the true events unfolding in the lives of both patients and their primary caregivers, the Nursing staff. This is not fiction but sentinel events faithfully recorded from the suffering and the healing which hourly transpires in any hospital anywhere.
    There are surprises; this is not a pink, warm fuzzy diary but a visceral accounting of the struggle to maintain humanity and compassion in an environment that runs the risk of becoming immune to it’s own drama in order to keep functioning efficiently. 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 her car, Susi Franco hitched up a tiny U-Haul loaded with the bare necessities, leaving her controlling 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 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 has a long history as an author , has been nationally published in the Orange Willow Review & “The Tails of the Village Idiot” by Nathan Hutnak; also online in various venues. Her writing has been the subject of newspaper stories and a cable tv show. Now disability retired & residing near the ocean in her beloved Rhode Island, Susi is a recognized professional fine artist and is finishing another book on womens’ issues and relationships.