Kathleen Shoop, author of After the Fog, on National Nurses Week

May 6-12 is National Nurses Week. My very best friend is a Cardiac Care ICU charge nurse. I am so proud and thankful of everything she(and all nurses, of course)does!


I'd like to thank Kathleen Shoop, author of After the Fog, who, in honor of this week, is sharing her thoughts...

"I’m so excited to be here during this important week! May 6th - 12th is National Nurses Week. I didn’t realize this important celebration and the release of my book, After the Fog, would coincide until recently. Why does it matter to me? The main character is Rose Pavlesic and she is a community nurse. While nurses of every era are underappreciated, incredibly skilled people who touch our lives when we need them most, there is a vintage group of nurses that I think very few people knew about. Heck, I didn’t know about them until I began to research my novel. Now I wish we still had them!

Here’s the set-up: It’s 1948 in the steel-mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania. Though it’s foggy everyday, this week, Halloween week, was especially dark and moody with the mill smoke trapped by a temperature inversion. The trapped toxins sickened and killed residents, creating the first environmental disaster to garner national attention and action. Beyond being inspired by the historic, true events of the “killing smog,” After the Fog reveals what the life of a community nurse may have been like.

This type of nurse split her days between clinic (conference) hours and home visit hours. They worked closely with doctors and followed-up with patients or suggested it when a doctor’s hand was needed. The work these nurses did involved everything from caring for those just born to those nearly dead. Their nurses’ bags were filled to the brim with standard equipment like culture slides, test-tubes, syringes and more.

The reports I read (nurses must be counted among the most meticulous record keepers in the world!) were practical in nature and straightforward. Take one that was given to help determine the need for community nurses in a local Pittsburgh mining town: Did they need a nurse in addition to the doctor employed by the mill? That was the question.

The nurse is confident in her findings as they pertained to one of the mine doctors: “Dr. Broadhurst…was not interviewed. If the condition of the house and its surroundings are at all indicative of the character of the man, one might judge that little could be expected of him, as the whole place was in a disgraceful condition.” Boy that made me smile. That candor, that flavor, that underlying stab at humor was what made these nurses capable of coping with dire or plain unattractive situations.

One nurse reveals in “Chats with a Public Health Nurse,” by Elizabeth Rath, the calls they take range from urgent, “a child is in convulsions,” to the misplaced, “who is going to get rid of this dead dog?” In the nurses’ typed and handwritten words are the qualities that reside in so many nurses—precise skill and observation. Their cool actions were shrouded in a little gallows humor now and again. I doubt the nurses writing these reports and stories meant to be funny. But reading them now, their unvarnished view of the needs of people and the towns in which they lived is fresh and probably a little of something we could use today.

Another nurse’s good humor is revealed in “Chats” when she details all the ways they must improvise without the benefit of hospital supplies, including “…crutches from mop sticks, hot water bottles from steaming corn cobs.” She adds, “Instead of being dismayed at finding no conveniences in the homes, most experienced public health nurses consider it a game. They can scarcely wait until they get into the office to tell the others what they improvised.”

This same ingenuity and dedication and care is still evident in nursing today—though it may more resemble how to deal with one’s insurance company than building incubators out of fruit boxes. Yes, the kindness and compassion they embody is nice, too, but that—the way their cool detachment and ability to deliver skilled care under pressure—is the quality I admire most.

Cheers to nurses everywhere, past and present!"


I will be reviewing Kathleen's new novel on June 1st. After the Fog has already won an award! The 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal for the Mid Atlantic Fiction category. If you just can't wait until then, please go to her website... http://kshoop.com/blog-news/ She is offering a fantastic health and wellness basket giveaway (that includes $100 Whole Foods gift card) throughout May in honor of National Nurses Week.