Year of the Nurse, Cassandra Alexander
Year of the Nurse, Cassandra Alexander
List: $28.00 | Sale: $19.60
Club: $14.00

Year of the Nurse
A 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir

Author: Cassandra Alexander

Narrator: Dolly Payne

Unabridged: 10 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/29/2022


Synopsis

This book is for everyone, nurse or otherwise, who is furious about how 2020 went down -- and how 2021 is going.

On April 25th, 2021 at 10:55 in the morning I messaged my chat group of girlfriends from where I work as a nurse on an ICU floor: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive,” and then tweeted that my “mental health wasn’t great” and deleted the Twitter app off of my phone because I didn’t want to “overshare.”
That I felt like dying.
That I would’ve rather died than still be at work.
I am not alone.

In 2020 there were roughly four million nurses in America. Only 2.7 million U.S. soldiers fought in the Vietnam War. Those soldiers who came back from Vietnam having witnessed atrocities—and in some cases, participated in them—were changed forever.
You can't send four million people into a wartime-equivalent situation without there being psychological consequences.
And yet that’s what America has done.
Nurses spent a year battling a largely unknown assailant. Running low on gear. Fearing we might bring something deadly home. Getting coughed on by people who pretended that our fights were imaginary, that our struggles—watching people die, day after day, no matter what we did—were literally fake.
Nurses are scarred.
And unless people understand what we went through and commit to never let anyone lie in the future about public health, we will never become whole.

Year of the Nurse: A Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir is Cassandra Alexander's poignant effort to come to grips with suicidal ideation and PTSD after being a covid nurse in an ICU in 2020. Comprised of original essays and her chronological journals, tweets, and emails as she attempted to save lives, including her own—this book will let you experience last year from the bedside.

Come and understand what it was like.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lynn on August 25, 2021

This book was a difficult but amazing read. My heart goes out to the author and to all those who are working in healthcare while too much of the world can't be bothered to take even basic precautions. This collection of tweets, journal entries and blog articles over the course of COVID's first year l......more

Goodreads review by Jen on August 10, 2021

I also worked as a covid nurse, and though our experiences were not exactly the same, this book helped me feel understood.......more

Goodreads review by Claire on July 30, 2021

Alexander has written a powerful memoir about 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is a scrapbook of her tweets and entries from her journal, interspersed with tech-nerd essays about nursing and medicine. Even if you think you understand the medical crisis we all faced (and are still facing), yo......more

Goodreads review by Nicki on November 10, 2022

3 1/2 stars. My main issue with this one is that it’s extremely long and very repetitive. For that reason I can’t rate it any higher, but 5 stars for the message and information. I think we all went through a lot (except those who denied it was happening. I pretty much share her thoughts on those pe......more

Goodreads review by Ladz on October 02, 2021

Content warning: PTSD, suicidal ideation, COVID death, illness, bodily fluids, graphic discussion of medical procedures Fucking harrowing as we get a front line view of the COVID pandemic from the very beginning through the first half of 2021. Nurses shouldn’t have to be this resilient. Told across se......more