Jennifer Culkin

After working as a NICU and PICU nurse, Culkin becomes a flight nurse. She describes harrowing life and death scenes, scenes whose outcome is known only if it is bad. If the patient dies in the air, she knows it. If the patient recovers… well, that happens on someone else’s watch. Telling her story in a thematic, rather than linear, arrangement, Culkin juxtaposes particular flights with more or less loosely related fragments of her own life: the growing up of her sons, especially the younger; her daredevil bike rides, surprising in someone who works with trauma patients; her parents’ aging, illness, and descent into selfishness; her own struggle with multiple sclerosis. For me, the hardest parts of the book to read were those about her parents’ final illnesses. Both become querulous, irrational, and self-centered, wanting those they love to perform backbreaking labor to care for them and refusing to accept outside help. None of the book is exactly easy to read—Culkin isn’t the kind of memoir writer who carefully balances the grim with the hopeful, and there’s a dark edge even to her beloved bike rides—but these sections are just plain ugly. The last chapter, in which she details some of the colleagues she’s lost to helicopter crashes, had me almost in tears. Again, she starts not with the first time this happens to her, but the most recent, looping back and forth through the connections. The nonlinear format, which is sometimes disorienting in other places, works particularly well in this last chapter.… (mais)

A brief but affecting memoir, Culkin spent years as a nurse working in ICU's (her specialty was in pediatrics so NICU and PICU) and then on the helicopter flights that oftentimes are the only chance a critically injured person has of making it to a hospital alive and this is her collection of connected essays about her experiences. In between the sometimes devastating, sometimes hopeful tales of life and death, Culkin also shares her own life, hopes and fears. She writes movingly of her mother's death and then her father's. She brings the reader to tears with her paean to her colleagues who have died in crashes while doing their very vital jobs. She doesn't just face the mortality of her patients, she faces of the mortality of those she loves, and even of herself, telling of her own battle against MS, which ultimately makes her give up her job. Her writing is powerful and I defy even the most cynical reader to stay unmoved when reading about the fragility that makes each and every one of us up. There are times the chapters are more clearly seperate essays rather than a smooth narrative but that's minor in the grand scheme of the book. There was one chapter that seemed slightly out of place to me: when Culkin explains her son's need for danger and speed, tracing it back to her own desire to live on the edge. But if taken in the context of the whole balance of life and death theme of the book as a whole, it does fit, although barely. I was generally impressed by the depth and strength of the book, finding it very moving.… (mais)