It takes us right to the bedside on hospital wards and home visits, in clinics and emergency rooms, capturing the drama of nurses' work in the story of three RNs at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. Life Support offers an intimate and important look at what nurses do for patients and their families. In chronicling the work of Rumplik, Kitchen, and Chaisson, Gordon brings a story of the soul of America's health care system. We learn how experienced nurses teach their colleagues, smooth over insensitive treatment by doctors, tend to illness, and bring dignity to death when treatment no longer works-all of which are roles that could not necessarily be filled by lower-paid, less-experienced personnel. She shows how these nurses create an environment in which high-technology medicine can thrive, but that is not devoid of human care and concern. Gordon painstakingly makes the point that it is not just surgery, ventilators, and dialysis machines that offer life support in the health care system. While Life Support draws attention to the often invisible work of nurses, it also highlights their plight in a health care system that increasingly focuses on the bottom line. Through their accounts Gordon tells us much about the health care system and about the nursing attention that allows people to tolerate the painful treatments and difficult choices that accompany high-technology medicine. And we meet Jeannie Chaisson, a medical clinical nurse specialist, whose work continues after her shift ends as she helps a husband and daughter come to terms with a loved one's desire to stop treatment and succumb to death. We meet nurse practitioner Ellen Kitchen, who provides home care to an 88-year-old man who does not want surgery for his prostate cancer. We meet Nancy Rumplik, an outpatient nurse in an ambulatory clinic, as she prevents a nearly fatal allergic reaction to a course of chemotherapy. In today's era of high-technology medicine, Suzanne Gordon, editor of books such as Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, brings us the story of three nurses who work to humanize the experience of receiving medical care.
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