Read The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital for Free Online

since her first Percocet and Lara was married now with two beautiful children, at South General narcotics tempted her every day. There were even more drugs available here than at her first ER. Nurses constantly left half-full vials on the counters and the protocol for disposing of them was often ignored.
Oh, look at that, there are some narcotics sitting right there
, a little voice would nudge Lara.
    She knew that the relapse rate for narcotics addiction was extremely high. To keep herself in check, she attended three Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week. She could count on dozens of friends she had made through NA who would help in an emergency. “In a way the addiction is a huge blessing because I have real strong people in my life now and they help me,” Lara explained. “I would have never thought that such a horrible situation would turn so positive.”
    Lara had been doing pretty well resisting temptation, all things considered. Until six days ago, when her mom, long suffering from emphysema, died in her arms. She was 65. Lara was devastated. She didn’t know how to cope with the loss of a parent.
    Now, on her first day back at work since the funeral, Lara stared at the vial in front of her. The narcotic promised her security, comfort, confidence, and a happy buzz that would dull the pain of her mother’s death. She wanted it so badly she could barely breathe.
It will make you feel better. No one will know. You want it. You deserve it. Take it
.

The Secret Club
    Nursing is among the most important professions in the world.
    In no other profession do people float ably among specialties, helping to ease babies into being, escorting men and women gently into death, and heroically resurrecting patients in between. There are few other careers in which people are so devoted to a noble purpose that they work twelve, fourteen, sixteen straight hours without eating, sleeping, or taking breaks and often without commensurate pay simply because they believe in the importance of their job. They are frequently the first responders on the front lines of malady and contagion, risking their own health to improve someone else’s. Nursing is more than a career; it is a calling. Nurses are remarkable. Yet contemporary literature largely neglects them.
    At 3.5 million strong in the United States and more than 20 million worldwide, nurses are the largest group of healthcare providers. The women who comprise 90 percent of the workforce are a unique sisterhood whose bonds are forged through the most dramatic miracles and traumas as well as the tedious, routine tasks necessary to keep human bodies functioning. Nursing, for brave men and women, is “like a secret club that holds immense emotional joy and fulfillment in spite of shared tragedies,” a Michigan nurse practitioner told me. Nurses call the profession a secret club because their experiences are so novel, their jobs so intimate and occasionally horrifying, their combination of compassion and desensitization so peculiar, that they imagine nobody else could understand what it is like to work in their once-white shoes.
    Pop culture would have us believe that nurses play a small, trivial role in healthcare; medical television programs tend to show doctors lingering at patients’ bedsides while nurses flit and intone “Yes, Doctor” in the background. But this is not the case. As a Minnesota agency nurse said, “We are not just bed-making, drink-serving, poop-wiping, medication-passing assistants. We are much more.”
    They are, for example, reporters. They discuss and document patient status, serving as the main point of contact for doctors, surgeons, therapists, social workers, and other specialists. They are watchmen, keeping vigil, meticulously monitoring vital signs, deciphering patients’ individual trends and patterns, painstakingly double-checking dosages and medications. They are detectives, investigating deviations, asking questions, listening carefully, searching for