Get Well Soon!: My (Un)Brilliant Career As A Nurse (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a great quick read! Chambers has a hilariously quick style of writing and the whole text is full of great one-liners. There were moments when I wholeheartedly belly-laughed until I cried and others when I had to take a break because I started feeling sick! Chambers makes you feel like you've experienced her life alongside her; she's descriptive enough so you have a clear picture of the scene, but she does this without rambling for which I am thankful for. Chapters are just the right length and I find they get better the further you get into it, although the final few chapters did slightly disappoint. Would recommend for anyone looking for a quick non-fiction read with a bit of swearing, a lot of gross mental images, lots of laughs and also quite a few tears! After reading Kristy Chambers's excellent memoir about her career in nursing, I can only conclude that it's a difficult job, and one that requires inordinate stress tolerance in order to stick it out. From the beginning, Chambers makes clear that nursing was not her 'calling', or anything of the sort; her career choice came down to a flip of the coin, essentially, between teaching and nursing. In a battle between dealing with arsehole teenagers and sick people, the latter group won. A breezy read at just over 200 pages, 'Get Well Soon' is structured as a series of vignettes of Chambers's seven years in the job, with a loose arc covering her beginnings as a student through to her final stint in the emergency department. Written as a comic memoir, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and vivid scenes of the human body malfunctioning in extraordinarily disgusting ways. While nursing offers a rich vein of comic delight for Chambers, there are several remarkable scenes wherein patients die and the author can't help herself from being overcome with emotion alongside the patients' families. These moments are well-drawn, and for me they are more valuable and honest than the persistent undercurrent of humour that Chambers is reliant upon.What struck me strongest while reading the book is something that's probably pretty obvious, but which I hadn't considered before: as a nurse, you're only ever dealing with people who are damaged in some way. Healthy, happy people don't usually come into contact with the medical profession. Instead, it's the sick and the unhappy who cross paths with doctors and nurses. This realisation is never directly addressed in 'Get Well Soon', but it is instead subtly reinforced through scene after scene starring patients with physical wounds and mental illness. I imagine that attempting to remain well while dealing with the unwell on a daily basis is the most difficult part of the job. Chambers copes with the stress of her shifts by drinking heavily, but even this escapist outlet is shut down when she starts working in detox. "The sadness of Bone Marrow made me want to drink and the alcoholics in Detox made me _not_ want to drink," she writes. 'Get Well Soon' is an insightful look into a career that I'd never considered, and having read this book I doubt I have the fortitude required to be a nurse. Evidently Chambers found that her career had an expiry date, too, as she has since left the profession – but not before taking studious notes and sharing the experience intelligently and empathically with an audience who is left all the wiser for her toil.
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This was a very poor attempt at humor by a very poor writer on a subject that isn't at all funny.
—peldon
