Published by HOPE PRESS INTERNATIONAL, this work is in recognition of the nurse healers and teachers in the trenches every day and every night. For those professionals all around the world, who are fighting, winning, and knowing they matter and that they absolutely can, must, and do make a difference every day, this book is the story of one nurse who was told by one doctor:
"You are just like all my other nurse patients. Nurses are horrible patients. You think you have to tell us what to do. I am the doctor, and you are the patient. You are supposed to tell me how you feel, not what to do. I decide that."
In response, this nurse/author sends a poignant reminder: "Dear Doctor, I am your teacher..."
This work is laced with many "Lessons Learned" that will benefit you and yours, perhaps even save your life.
The author states:
"The extensive personal medical history which I share is one reason I have held back on publishing this story for nearly 20 years. Many details are shared reluctantly, but shared nevertheless, because it will give you a glimpse of what nurses deal with every single day. Doctors usually admit patients to the hospital for their present-day chief complaint and with a focus on the diagnosis or procedure of the hour. Nurses then coordinate total care for the whole person behind that need of the hour and they must consider complex past histories as they do so. I think it is important for us to understand this and to know that many a nurse has saved many a doctor's ass (and license) time and time again! After I recovered from the complications of my colectomy, my primary care doctor suggested that I lecture at medical schools when I was stronger. He said there was much that doctors could learn from me. That was and is true, but not just true of me. Every patient has a history and is a story. Many of those stories are riddled with much more anguish and pain, and far more daily struggle than I have experienced. I have dedicated my life to helping them tell their stories. So now I tell mine."
Thus "Dear Doctor, I am your teacher" chronicles the journey of a nurse whose personal fight to restore her health was punctuated by medical missteps, omissions, assumptions, and bad treatment. In essence, the patient becomes the teacher, the advisor, the encyclopedia of knowledge for the doctors beyond the textbooks...and her own physical and emotional source of strength for recovery. But more than that, as the story unfolds, the reader will be drawn into its metaphorical similarities to life in general: first the regret, sorrow, anger, pain, and futility, followed by healing, forgiveness, faith, love, and the iron-clad will to survive. Indeed, it is victory of physical and emotional proportions that will benefit all readers.