A SPLENDID GIFT

In this memoir, a veteran health care worker shares inspirational adventures from her long career.

For as long as she could remember, Prisceaux always wanted to be a nurse. In her heartfelt, anecdotal book, she recalls growing up in Yonkers in awe of nursing revolutionary Florence Nightingale and how she “wanted to be just like her.” As a teenager, her bouts with paralyzing shyness soon vanished once she pursued a nurse’s aide job at a local hospital in the Philadelphia suburb where her family had relocated. Prisceaux emerged as a determined, goal-oriented young woman aiming her sights on New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Center and School of Nursing in 1959 (costing only $200). Even falling down a flight of stairs at the Port Authority on the morning of her admission interview couldn’t derail her. She describes her school years in animated detail, recalling working as a nurse “determined to survive every curve thrown at me in this strange new world I found myself in.” A naturally engaging storyteller, Prisceaux stuffs her memoir with anecdotes, stories, opinions, and seasoned perspectives, spanning the best and worst moments of the author’s 60-year nursing career. Among the more resonant highlights are memories of the first time she sponge-bathed a smirking male patient at the age of 18 and the whirlwind months spent in the Army Nurse Corps, only to then fall madly in love, get married, and welcome her daughter Laura Mary in 1964. As a young nurse, the author agonized over the accidental deaths of patients she’d attended to in the emergency room or intensive care ward. But with experience and numerous relocations, and despite marital discord and the exhaustive mothering of three children, the author became admired and respected as a nursing “road warrior.” Prisceaux closely observed the health care industry evolve across its medical, political, and technological landscapes. She remarks with great insight and knowledge about the seemingly never-ending series of changes that continued to take place in modern medicine. Nurses in general—as well as those suffering from career burnout—will find much inspiration and encouragement in the author’s tender, droll, humorous, and immensely moving stories about the intense work regimen, the personal struggles, and the often bittersweet but fulfilling patient interactions.

A forthright, poignant, and heartwarming account of a storied and beloved career in nursing.