22 Quotes by Theresa Brown

For where else can I go to sample daily the richness of life in all its profound chaos?

That's the thing about empathy—even people with an abundance of it can run out.

A shift lasts twelve hours. Twelve hours of holding a few lives in my hands, trying to make order out of the chaos of bodies and disease, working within a health care system that sometimes forgets it exists to serve human beings rather than bureaucrats or businessmen. Amid the many uncertainties of the shift there is one thing I know for sure. Am I ready and up to the job? Yes. Today, and every day, for the sake of my patients I have no other option; the answer has to be, and always is, Yes.

Patient care – looking after Sheila, Dorothy, Richard Hampton, and Candace – is heart and soul, but these days, charting pulls nurses away from the bedside more and more.

That’s the thing about empathy – even people with an abundance of it can run out.

In all the hurly-burly, I’d forgotten, but now I remember: The most important thing of all is that everyone’s alive at the end of the day.

Work is love made visible. And what is it to work with love?” the poet Khalil Gibran wrote. In the hospital, working with love sometimes requires putting people in danger.

I look at her. This is the moment when she will leave my care for good. Mine may be the last familiar hospital face she sees before she goes under and I want her to remember it as calm and present.

You can only know what you know, a wise friend told me, but so much is on the line here in the hospital I sometimes want to know more than I can.