The Nurse's Story

By Carol Gino

Book Overview

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - A powerful true story originally published by Simon & Schuster, serialized nationwide, and adapted into a screenplay by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.

Teri Daley is a new nurse with a genuine calling to help others, but nothing in nursing school prepared her for the challenges of nurse-patient relations, hospital bureaucracy, the mystery of healing, or the raw grief of unpredictable mortality.

Based on Gino's own years in critical care and intensive care units, this fictionalized nurse memoir takes you behind the scenes of big-city hospital wards where life-and-death decisions are made in seconds.

How can she help the family of a terminally ill patient when the doctor can do nothing more?What can she do for a 10-year-old burn victim for whom most of consciousness is pain?How does she convince the doctor of her intuition that the patient cannot survive major surgery at a given time?And how can she leave all of this behind at the end of her twelve-hour shift?

If you've ever been moved by real-life nurse memoirs like The Shift, The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital, or The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story, this novel will feel like finally hearing your own story told out loud.

"The first book to really take you behind hospital doors." - New York Times

"So steeped in reality...that to call it fiction seems scarcely adequate." - People

"The most shattering and exhilarating book on nursing ever written." - Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather

"Belongs on the shelf of every nursing school, every hospital, and every public library in the country." - Midwest Book Review

"Riveting, wrenching...Few nurses have experienced the range of cases this dedicated woman describes. The writer is a vigorous, optimistic, caring woman-and she exudes frankness." - Los Angeles Times

From the book

"I walked back into her room and closed the door behind me. I turned off the alarm on the respirator, detached her and started blindly to do her dressings. I refused to look at the monitor. And then, for the first time, I held her small body tight against me. I hugged her, rocking. After I laid her down and fixed her bed, I straightened the entire room. Finally, I looked at the monitor. Straight line.

I opened the chart to see what the doctor had written. It read: 'Patient died while on respirator. Pronounced dead at 6:45 A.M.'"

Author's Note

I was a nurse for more than thirty years-in emergency rooms, burn units, ICU, pediatrics, hospice, psyche wards, and home healthcare-and every scene in this book is drawn from the real patients and families I cared for. To protect their privacy, I changed names and details. But the babies I kept vigil over, the families I had to tell the truth to, and the moments when I knew in my bones what a chart could never say-and at times had to put my job on the line to give my patient a fighting chance-are exactly as I lived them. These stories grew out of the lives of patients and colleagues that have never left my heart. Their real names and faces, I will never forget.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1936530465
• ISBN13: 9781936530465
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Aaha! Books LLC
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Read this book many years ago

I read this book 18 years ago and it made an impression on me. Over the years I've thought about the book over and over again--the different stories, the people, the morals, etc. I think about the socialite with breast cancer and the dilemma of administering a fatal dose of morphine to a patient in pain. This is a book that definitely stays with you.

Endagered Spieces: Nurses with Compassion

I found this book at a goodwill store, at first expecting not to find anything at all. I bought it for a dollar then started reading it just to check it out, but then found myself deeply attached to it. My mother is a nurse and the only reason this book got my attention on the shelf was because I wanted a narrative true story of what her life *must be like* at work. All in all, this is a very well-written book. **Someone above made a comment about her home life story not being "worth a reader's time," but hey, it's reality and I didn't expect her to start telling stories of her glass slipper or eating a poisoned apple. Anyone with compassion would understand what she's been through (especially waiting anxiously for her husband to return before she realizes she's been abandoned again and again) and and the only reason it doesn't sound "exciting" (to some readers) is because she obviously skipped more painful and complicated details. Any reader should be able to understand that. And isn't this a story about *nurses* after all?Anyway, the book is amazing. It opened my eyes a little to what nurses really go through and what they have to do to keep their sanity. It made me understand my mother's work more. It is one of the toughest jobs out there and the author definitely gives us a great & down-to-earth tour of her journey. Go ahead and read it. You'll laugh and cry.

Not About Nurse's

"The Nurse's Story" is a book about patients. Carol Gino tells about her years of nursing without writing a book about herself. Instead, she focuses on her patients, on their courage, pain, and the lessons they pass on to all of us. In "The Nurses Story" we see nursing rise above science. Ms. Gino makes this a book about caretaking, a book we can all use to aid in our own healing.

A heart-wrenching story of a nurse's compassion

This novel tells the tale of a nurse and her life in a way that has had me laughing and crying throughout the story. The characters became so real to me I could hardly put the book down. I really felt for them. The way I view the field of medicine since reading this book has drastically changed.

Couldn't put the book down

This story is about a compassionate young nurse who wants to take away pain and heal everyone because she believes that between good doctors and miraculous medicine, all suffering can be taken away. She works in all areas of a hospital, from the burn unit to pediatrics. We follow her through a couple of cases where you can almost feel the pain of her patients and her anguish at not being able to do much more than make them as comfortable as possible or being a friend to a women in confinement with a contagious disease. She learns of a system that ties her hands and the stress from understaffing, but she also learns of healing on all aspects and that there is a higher power, and no amount of screaming and yelling will change some outcomes. She tells it like it is. Read this book and you will never see hospitals in the same way.