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follow, but this book does not intend to denigrate doctors, techs, or, for that matter, patients. It is meant to represent nurses’ perspectives and to celebrate them.
    In doing so, this book does not romanticize the career. Nurses want the public to know the truth about nursing. It can be a difficult, exhausting, exasperating, and dangerous job in which they are often overworked and understaffed. But it is also joyous, rewarding, challenging, fascinating, exciting, and meaningful. Nurses want current and future patients and their families to know the healthcare secrets that can save their lives. And they want potential future nurses to know how deeply and passionately they love what they do. “Nursing is not a job. It is a life,” a Kansas nurse manager said. “It is who you are.”
    The nurses who shared their thoughts and stories for this book invite you to peer behind the Staff Only door at the controlled chaos beyond: the jubilance and heartbreak; the temptations, drugs, lies, and violence; the miracles and wonders; the dark humor and innuendo; and most of all, the people who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable and bolster us on what could be the worst or best or last days of our lives.
    “Doctors breeze in and out. They do not share the most intimate moments with the patients, but they are the ‘important’ ones who get the media accolades,” a New Jersey nurse practitioner said. “It is the nurse who holds the hand of a patient without a family, who talks to them while they take their last breaths, who aches for them while they die alone. It is the nurse who cleans the patient’s body, wipes away the blood and fluids, and closes his eyes. It is the nurse who says good-bye to the patient for the last time,” she said. “Our story needs to be told. We want to be heard.”
    They will be. And you will never view healthcare the same way again.

JULIETTE   PINES MEMORIAL, August
    When she left the patient’s room, Juliette retrieved an alcohol swab from her pocket and began to wipe down the pen the man had used to sign his discharge papers. Then she thought better of it. The patient was crazy and probably didn’t bathe often. She threw out the pen, stripped off her gloves, and trashed them, too. Back at the nurses station, she scrubbed her arms, hands, and neck with hand sanitizer, even though she had been wearing a yellow contact isolation gown.
    Juliette’s husband made fun of her for being a germaphobe nurse, but she didn’t care. She sanitized her hands so often they were red and chapped. All day long she saw sick patients who didn’t wash their hands, who touched their faces (or worse), and then touched everything in the room. She reminded patients to cover their mouths when they coughed or sneezed, and still, they sprayed the triage booth unapologetically. The first couple of years she had worked as an ER nurse, she was constantly sick with respiratory or GI illnesses. Now she rarely got sick, but she was determined to protect her family from those germs. Even at home, Juliette made her daughter, Michelle, wash her hands constantly. Molly—the opposite of a germaphobe—teased Juliette that she bathed her child in Purell.
    The ER felt different without Molly. In the three weeks since Molly had left, the unit had been noticeably quiet and boring. Without Molly’s witty sarcasm and infectious laugh, it was harder to deal with Charlene, the insufferable nursing supervisor. Without Molly, Juliette was lonely at work.
    Socially, Pines Memorial hadn’t panned out as Juliette had hoped. At Avenue, the hospital where Juliette, Molly, and Lara had worked together before, the nurses had formed a lasting bond. They were together constantly, at and outside of work. When the Avenue nurse manager, whom Juliette had adored, left, and a disorganized, inexperienced manager took over, the nurses scattered to various hospitals across the region. But they had grown so close that three years after leaving