Angels with Stethoscopes: A Surprising, Compelling Journey into the Heart and Work of an RN

Susi Franco
AuthorHouse (2006)
ISBN 1425949118
Reviewed by Marcy Burns for Reader Views (11/06)


This amazing book will touch the reader’s heart, sometimes near to breaking.
Have you ever wondered how nurses cope day after day with the pain that their patients endure? They can provide the most competent care, but still many of their patients will suffer and some will die. They can do what they must do with steely discipline, and they can resolve to be indifferent.  Still, the best of them, those who are “Angels with Stethoscopes” remain compassionate and caring and inevitably they, too, suffer.

Susi Franco is surely among the best.  Her poetry, in an astonishingly effective mix with prose, at times is a lament, at times a tender love song, and at times a despairing wail. The words grab you and take you into the dreaded world of dying and death. They do not spare the horrors and the ugliness, the blood and panic and fear, but they speak, too, of hope and healing and understanding.

When her own daughter is gravely injured, Susi Franco at once knows too much and can do too little. She navigates the impossible path of “Mother who is a nurse” sometimes with courage and sometimes with helpless grief. She does not spare herself in the words that take you along on that journey.

This is a remarkable, beautifully written book.  Its impact on the reader cannot be captured in any single excerpt, but consider the following:

The passing of a life is
a time to
Be somber.

Looking at him there in the bed,
Unshaven
Dirty
Sharp bones barely covered with flesh
The smell of death oozing from him
It is difficult to imagine
What kind of life he lived.

I do not include the entire poem, but I wish that I could. It is that tender and loving.  “Angels with Stethoscopes” is a book for anyone, everyone. Read it.  You will be richer. 

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