The Heart's Truth: Essays on the Art of Nursing

by Davis, Cortney

• ISBN13: 9781606350034
• ISBN10: 160635003X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-28
• Publisher: Kent State Univ Pr

Summary

What is it like to be a student nurse washing the feet of a dying patient? To be a newly graduated nurse, in charge of the Intensive Care Unit for the first time, who wonders if her mistake might have cost a life? Or to be an experienced nurse who, by her presence and care, holds a patient to this world? Poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis answers these questions by examining her own experiences and through them reveals a glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable. The Heart's Truth offers the joys, frustrations, fears, and miraculous moments that nurses, new and experienced, face every day. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Cortney Davis is the author of three poetry collections, including Leopold's Maneuvers (2004), which won the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize and the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award. She has coauthored two anthologies of poetry and prose by nurses, Between the Heartbeats (1995) and Intensive Care (2003). Her memoir, I Knew a Woman: The Experience of the Female Body (2001), won the Connecticut Center for the Book Nonfiction Prize in 2002.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
The Other Side of Illness	p. 1
Washing Mrs. Cardiff's Feet	p. 4
The Evening Back Rub	p. 9
Being at the Bedside of the Dying	p. 11
First Night in Charge	p. 15
Talking to No One	p. 20
Nursing and the Word	p. 25
Beyond Scientific Explanation	p. 31
Weekly Rounds	p. 34
Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Nurse Practitioner	p. 37
First, Do No Harm	p. 46
Hearing the Stories behind Our Patients' Words	p. 49
Body Teaching	p. 54
Tattoos	p. 59
Breaking Bad News	p. 63
Becoming Flora	p. 69
Raped	p. 74
The Heart's Truth	p. 76
Watching ER	p. 78
Feeding the Deer	p. 81
When Their Rhythms Become Mine	p. 83
I Believe in Grief	p. 86
Human Feelings, Human Experiences	p. 88
Conscious Suffering	p. 92
Afterword	p. 97
Acknowledgments	p. 99
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