The Courage to Care: A Call for Compassion
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By Christie Watson
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Nurses have never been more important.
‘An inspiring book for our challenging times’ Olivia Coleman
We benefit from their expertise in our hospitals and beyond: in our schools, on our streets, in prisons, hospices and care homes. When we feel most alone, nurses remind us that we are not alone at all.
In The Courage to Care bestselling author Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses’ work:
- A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression
- A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado
- A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus.
Christie makes a further discovery: that, time and again, it is patients and their families – including her own – who show exceptional strength in the most challenging times. We are all deserving of compassion, and as we share in each other’s suffering, Christie Watson shows us how we can find courage too. The courage to care.
’Let’s be thankful for wonderful nurses – and writers – like Christie Watson’ Jacqueline Wilson
‘The handbook for compassion… a must-read’ Chris Evans
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I’ve read my share of medical memoirs over the past year, from Adam Kay’s THIS IS GOING TO HURT to Amanda Brown’s THE PRISON DOCTOR and Joanna Cannon’s BREAKING AND MENDING. Christie Watson’s THE COURAGE TO CARE fits in nicely along these, though with two key differences: she focusses on nurses rather than doctors, and she writes mainly about others rather than about herself.
The memoir is definitely at its strongest when Watson is recounting the incredible challenges faced by her patients, their families, and the nurses who care for them. Her respect and admiration for their resilience, along with her own compassion, shine through in every vignette, and there were multiple instances where I couldn’t help tearing up. So much of what she describes is unimaginable, yet it’s what these brave women and men face every day.
For that reason alone, this is a story worth reading. As a book, however, I don’t feel like it’s very well put together. The story jumps back and forth between so many different people, focussing on one patient, jumping back to offer a related vignette, and then returning to the first patient, that I often lost track of where we were or what was happening. There was no sense of any cohesive through-thread, and by the end of the book I felt like I had been hit with a barrage of stories, rather than being taken on a journey.
Similarly, while the book is confessedly about the resilience of nurses and their patients, Watson also weaves in significant sections about her own journey to adopting her son. These sections are equally fascinating, yet they seem slightly incongruous in a book about nurses. I would gladly read a full book about Watson’s adoption process and the challenges of the adoption system, but its inclusion in this book only made an already muddy narrative even messier.
It feels wrong, after the year we’ve had, to not automatically give anything written by a nurse a five-star rating. THE COURAGE TO CARE is an eye-opening book in so many ways and we all need to read more stories like this. That said, the structure and wide-ranging content of this relatively short book simply don’t provide the subject matter with the vehicle it deserves. We definitely need more books celebrating nurses, hopefully ones with more structure and cohesion.
Goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4107913710
