“His pain - physical, existential, emotional - changed the course of Saunders’s life and of history,” DiGregorio writes. Christopher’s Hospice in 1947, as she cares for a 40-year-old man dying of cancer. And then, in a subtle takedown of the pharmaceutical industry responsible for the legacy of oxycodone, Mezon can also “show someone how to use a fentanyl test to make sure the heroin is not cut with the more potent drug.”ĭiGregorio’s storytelling is pitch-perfect narrative and nursing, she understands, come from the same place and both are concerned with a deep understanding of character and plot. Here, she trains “harm reduction specialists,” including Mezon, whose role DiGregorio describes unflinchingly: how to inject, to use a tourniquet, avoid the burn of hitting an artery. Synn Stern, a registered nurse who runs an overdose prevention center in New York. In the area of addiction, nurses trailblaze harm reduction clinics where people can safely inject heroin. “Nurses are not always understood as crucial to climate change response, but they should be, because they are uniquely situated to respond.” In a chapter on the environment, the expansive role of nurses in the battle against climate change is addressed: from evacuating babies to researching heat-related kidney failure in agricultural workers to advocating for school policy that mitigates asthma rates.

And historical echoes bounce off the most urgent contemporary issues.

My brilliant friend book review