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Beautiful unbroken : one nurse's life / Mary Jane Nealon.

by Nealon, Mary Jane.

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Minneapolis : Graywolf Press, c2011.

Nealon, Mary Jane.

Nurses -- United States -- Biography.

Poets, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

9781555975906 (pbk.) :

x, 212 p. ; 21 cm.

Wanting to Save Everyone. Where it began ; My brother's accidents ; Nursing school ; First patients ; Unforgivable --- Flying Nurse. Grief and escape ; Poetry and escape ; There is no escape ; Private duty ; I love a soldier ; I leran everything in one day -- I Can Only Save Myself. Everyone may be lost ; The world is broken ; Refuge ; A kind of miracle ; Healing ; The homeless ; I come home to my mother ; I come home to my father ; The beautiful unbroken.

This book is a memoir by a working nurse. As a child, the author dreams of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. She idolizes Clara Barton, Kateri Tekakwitha, and Molly Pitcher, whose biographies she reads and rereads. But by the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry. This work details her life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city's first AIDS wards. In this memoir, she brings a poet's sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death.

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