© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

"The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives"

Aired on Wednesday, December 2nd.

On this presentation of ST on Health, an interesting chat with Theresa Brown, a clinical nurse who also writes regularly about nursing for The New York Times, CNN.com, and other national media. Brown's new memoir is "The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives," and Publishers Weekly (in a starred review) called it a "meticulous, absorbing shift-in-the-life account of one nurse's day on a cancer ward [which] stands out for its honesty, clarity, and heart. Brown...juggles the fears, hopes, and realities of a 12-hour shift in a typical urban hospital with remarkable insight and unflagging care. Her memoir is a must-read." And further, per the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Brown does an excellent job of taking us moment by moment through her day -- meeting the patients (one difficult, one frail, one possibly dying, one about to go home); the paperwork (endless); the fail-safe procedures (also endless, but clearly important); the workarounds (not always kosher, but sometimes the only way to get things done). Brown [is] skillful at keeping the narrative flowing. The reader feels her affection and deep sense of responsibility for her patients, even the aggravating ones, and her frustration over not being able to give them each the attention she believes they need."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
Related Content