Life Dust: Writing Through a Nursing Lens
Life Dust: Writing Through a Nursing Lens
What do John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, Katherine Neville, and Pam Webber have in common? We all write novels that include aspects of our previous or current professions. In other words, we write what we know. Not just for the ease and added insight, but because we can demystify, twist, and turn what we know in unique and entertaining ways.
Grisham is a lawyer who writes about interesting points of law and the sometimes-risky work of lawyers. Patricia Cornwell, a former employee of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, writes murder mysteries that are as factual and detailed as they are fascinating. Katherine Neville turned her experience with international computer analytics into extraordinary stories of calculated intrigue. And me? I’m a nurse, so I write about the ups and downs of the human experience, especially those vulnerable folks who are reeling from the curve balls of life and those who dare to care.
As a young nurse, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Donna Diers, the late Dean and Professor Emerita of Yale’s School of Nursing, speak about the different philosophies governing nurses and doctors. Her opening line has stayed with me for decades. “Medicine is the diagnosis and treatment of pathology, and nursing is all else,” she said.
All else? Really? Wide-eyed at the assertion, I wasn’t sure I believed her. However, through my early career as an emergency room and critical care nurse and later as a nursing educator and nurse practitioner, I’ve come to realize Dr. Diers was a very wise woman. People are more than diseases and treatments⎯a lot more, and nurses care for them. Living or dying, young, old, or in the middle, rich, poor, happy or sad, good or evil, welcoming or not, nurses are there. Regardless of pathology, lifestyle, culture, language, religion, temperament, tolerance, or complexity, nurses are there, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Certainly, nurses are not the only health professionals who care, but their care is unique because it builds on blended empathy. Resolute in their purpose and power, they care for others using blended cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual empathy. More specifically, nurses take the time to connect with patients in personal and multidimensional ways.
As an internal medicine nurse practitioner, I’ve cared for some patients for decades, regularly providing a safe haven for them to discuss their health, joys, heartaches, stressors, aches and pains, beliefs, and fears. Along the way, I get to know their families and the ups and downs of their lives. I celebrate when they recover from illness and grieve when they don’t. I’m a small piece of the fabric of their lives, and they are a small piece of mine.
The ability to empathize also influences my work as a novelist. In each story, I work hard to develop realistic characters with cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual qualities that mirror real people and their sometimes-turbulent lives. If I get it right, readers connect with the characters and follow them until the end of the story.
In my latest novel, Life Dust, readers intersect the lives of a young nurse trying to survive the ugly inner workings of a busy Northern Virginia emergency room and her soldier fiancé trying to survive reconnaissance missions in the jungles of Vietnam. My experience in hospital nursing influenced the nursing side, and my husband’s experience in Vietnam influenced the soldier’s side. Hopefully, readers will connect with these and other characters in a personal way.
If you decide to read Life Dust, let me know how and in what ways you relate to the various characters. I’d love to know if you see them with empathetic eyes.
Cheers and best wishes!
Pam
Pam Webber is author of the bestselling debut Southern novel, The Wiregrass and its standalone sequels, Moon Water and Life Dust. She lives in the Northern Shenandoah Valley near the setting for her stories. Visit Pam at www.pamwebber.com.
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LIFE DUST
Nettie and Andy have been soul mates since childhood. While planning their wedding, Andy receives orders from the Army to deploy immediately to South Vietnam for a year.
Anxious about Andy’s safety, Nettie dives into her work as a nursing intern in the hospital emergency room. When she inadvertently walks in on a nursing supervisor and surgeon during a late-night tryst, the vengeful lovers initiate a campaign to end her career before it starts. Nettie’s only respite is an elderly patient who has everything money can buy―except the one thing he wants.
In Southeast Asia, Andy is leading a long-range reconnaissance squad in an unforgiving jungle when he receives orders to escort a high-ranking female freedom fighter, Bien, to a clandestine meeting with an enemy officer who wants to defect. Previously raped, beaten, and left for dead by North Vietnamese soldiers, Bien is suspicious of the enemy officer’s motives, but she also thinks he may be the younger brother her attackers conscripted into their army as a child. Andy, meanwhile, believes his unit is walking into a trap that could cost them everything.
Struggling to survive in different worlds, Nettie and Andy navigate the best and worst of human nature as they try to find their way back to each other.
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Category: On Writing
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