On Nursing and Becoming:
Buddhist reflections on Living and Dying by an ICU NURSe
Awarded an honorable mention in the 2025 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest.
A memoir of an ICU nurse starting her career in a neuroscience critical care unit where she encounters patients with debilitating strokes, traumatic brain injuries, and other devastating neurological conditions. Written in epistolary style with a unique Buddhist perspective, readers will enter a world-class academic teaching hospital where many critically ill patients are alive but not living, misery and suffering abound, and the human will to endure is tested.
Reflecting on her first few shifts:
“Of all the things, of all the medical conditions, of all the diseases, of all the curiosities, of all the parts of the body … that I would end up working in a unit which deals with the one piece of anatomy that I find the most sacred: the human brain.”
She encounters patients and families burdened with terrible personal tragedies: young men who have been shot multiple times in the head, patients with anoxic brain injury after cocaine and fentanyl overdoses, a new mother with a catastrophic brain bleed from an undiagnosed tumor…
But in the morass of blood, guts, complicated family dynamic and hospital politics, she also finds hope and beauty: a quadriplegic man who decides to become standup comedian, a wedding ceremony performed at bedside, small acts of love and compassion, and deep human connection.
“It is the most horrifying, heart-breaking, and beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced … and all at the same time. I’ve learned a thousand new things on my first three shifts. Seneca once said it takes a lifetime to learn how to live. Maybe it takes just one nurse’s shift in an ICU.”
Later in her career she transfers from neuro critical care to a burn ICU. When she encounters a patient who has been assaulted, bound, gagged, and deliberately set on fire, she wonders:
“How do we humans come up with such ways to hurt each other? … Seems I have just traded one human tragedy for another: bullets for burns.“
Selected Excerpts
Read unforgettable portrayals of love and loss, and dive into the behind-the-scenes politics and short-comings in one of the most prominent academic teaching hospitals in the U.S.
Awarded an honorable mention in the 2025 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest.
On Nursing and Becoming: A Memoir 