While the sentiment is nice, this book is everything that is wrong with society’s view of nurses. I was bought this book as a gift by my well meaning partner, but an emergency nurse, I can’t finish this. We just have a cool job and some nurses are supernaturally caring. It’s crazy and fun and emotional and sure not everyone can do it…but we aren’t super special people for it. It felt like a lot of the people were trying to dramatically convince the readers that ER nurses are some how greater than regular people. Yes there was some of that but…many of the stories felt like dramatic virtue signaling. I was hoping for more stories about the stuff we deal with that people don’t know about…like the large amount of psych patients, the social work aspect like when we have to literally take children away from unfit parents, all the crazy and outrageous scenarios that happen. We do see death, but we also see mostly heart burn, seasonal allergies and ingrown toenails. Last, a lot of the stories/interviewed nurses talked about how much death they see and how “we see death everyday.” That felt really different from the reality of the ER. No hate to those lines of nursing…but it was misleading. Second, this book is called ER nurses yet it contains a lot of ICU and Paramedic/flight nurse stories.

It was almost embarrassing to believe people think just because we are from the south we sound like that…we don’t. The performers insisted on giving every Texan and southern state nurse the most ridiculous accent. First of all, I live in the Dallas/FW area and I am from Texas.

I was hoping to relate to this book and relive my ER days. I haven’t worked since my last child was born and was counting down to the release day of this book to reminisce on the job i miss so much. Nurse in one of the top five busiest ERs in the country. I was so excited for it because I was an E.R.

James patterson er nurses book