Get Well Soon! My (Un)Brilliant Career as a Nurse (Kristy Chambers, UQP)

*Nonfiction

Television audiences have been inundated with programs that attempt to depict the medical profession. Brisbane nurse Kristy Chambers’ memoir Get Well Soon! embodies the reason for their popularity: our tendency to be both repulsed and entranced by other people’s medical experiences, from harrowing terminal illnesses to stomach-turning conditions. Chambers contorts seemingly distressing tales of cancer patients, drug users and alcoholics, and other emergency department regulars into witty, unrestrained anecdotes. Through Chambers I have learned that nurses are not trained in how to react when confronted with a three-week-old tampon, and that my fear of bodily prolapse is well founded (especially if it were to happen during the night shift when nurses are prone to fits of giggles). The sheer number of cases that Chambers relates can be overwhelming, but for those who have the guts to read about the confronting nature of nursing, Get Well Soon! is perfectly suited. This is an unsettling account of nursing that is devoid of dramatisation, characterised by cynicism, and delivered in the darkly comic style of Judith Lucy.

Megan Hancock works at Ellison Hawker Bookshop where the only blood she sees comes from a paper cut

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Category: Reviews