Theresa Brown’s new memoir
Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient
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When an oncology nurse is diagnosed with cancer, she has to confront the most critical, terrified, and angry patient she’s ever encountered: herself.
New York Times bestselling author Theresa Brown tells a poignant, powerful, and intensely personal story about breast cancer in Healing. She brings us along with her from the mammogram that would change her life through her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Despite her training and years of experience as an oncology and hospice nurse, she finds herself continually surprised by the lack of compassion in the medical maze—just as so many of us have. Why is she expected to wait over a long weekend to hear the results of her cancer tests if they are ready? Why is she so often left in the dark about procedures and treatments? Where is the empathy from caregivers? At times she’s mad at herself for not speaking up and asking for what she needs but knows that anyone labeled a “difficult” patient risks getting worse care.
As she did in her book The Shift, Brown draws us into her work with the unforgettable details of her daily life—the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the frustrated patients—but from her new perch as a patient, she also takes a look back with rare candor at some of her own cases as a nurse and considers what she didn’t know then and what she could have done better. A must-read for all of us who have tried to find healing through our health-care system.
“Healing is a stunning book that helped me understand how to survive a serious illness and how to understand hospitals in general. Theresa Brown, RN, is also a hell of a good writer.” — James Patterson
“Deeply moving.” — Damon Tweedy, New York Times bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat
“A smart, moving, clear-eyed, yet ultimately hopeful jewel of a read on health and care from one of the most thoughtful healthcare writers I know.” — Pauline W. Chen, MD, bestselling author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality
Theresa Brown
Nurse, Writer, and NY Times Bestselling Author of The Shift
Recent Columns & News
It’s Personal: When There’s No One Right Medical Response to Cancer
November 2025
A friend recently asked me to chat with a friend of hers whose breast cancer had returned 7 years out from her initial diagnosis. It was unlikely that this woman—whom I’ll call Jane—would have a cancer recurrence, but not impossible, despite following all her given treatment recommendations, including taking the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen longer than the minimum of 5 years. The problem she faced now, beyond the return of her disease, was receiving conflicting advice from her oncologists. I told Jane that lacking a clear treatment choice gave her the burden of choice, but also the luxury of choice: a characterization that may be helpful for other patients with cancer and clinicians to understand.
Patients With Breast Cancer Don’t Have to Live With Pain
October 2025
As a patient with breast cancer, I find October a difficult month. Suddenly having the world go pink reminds me of my disease in a way that feels unpleasant rather than supportive. But this October I have some great information to share with patients who have breast cancer and the nurses and physicians who care for them. My message is as simple as this column’s title suggests: patients with breast cancer, and specifically patients who have undergone lumpectomy, don’t have to live with ongoing postsurgical pain—at least not all of us.
A Close Look at the Research: Tylenol Does Not Cause Autism
October 2025
“There are three types of lies—lies, damn lies, and statistics,” famously said Mark Twain, making a point about the ease with which one can manipulate numbers to give the appearance of truth regardless of whether they are actually true. I thought of that quotation as I reviewed the two primary articles discussed after President Trump’s recent declaration that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism.
About Theresa
Theresa Brown, PhD, BSN, RN, is a nurse and writer who lives in Pittsburgh. Her third book —Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient — was published April 2022 and is available wherever books are sold. It explores her diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer in the context of her own nursing work. Her book, The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives, was a New York Times Bestseller.
Theresa has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and her writing has appeared on CNN.com, and in The American Journal of Nursing, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Theresa has been a guest on MSNBC Live and NPR’s Fresh Air. Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between is her first book. It chronicles her initial year of nursing and has been adopted as a textbook in Schools of Nursing across the country.
Theresa's BSN is from the University of Pittsburgh, and during what she calls her past life she received a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She lectures nationally and internationally on issues related to nursing, health care, and end of life. Becoming a mom led Theresa to leave academia and pursue nursing. It is a career change she has never regretted.
Available Now
Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient
As an oncology and hospice nurse, I thought I knew cancer—knew it. But when I was diagnosed with cancer myself, I realized I knew nothing at all about being a cancer patient: how terrifying having cancer is, and how lonely. Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient traces the intersection of my nurse-self and my patient-self, from breast cancer diagnosis through treatment and after, when I return to work in home hospice. What did Theresa-the-nurse learn from Theresa-the-patient? That we want and need compassion from our health care. Medicine can cure, but healing requires more: thoughtfulness, listening, and a genuine and generous focus on every patient.
