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

Why Nurses Are Soldiers for Compassion
April 2026

The way people and countries spend their money says a lot about their values. I’m not the first person to point out that the billions of dollars our president is spending on a war with Iran could be spent on healthcare instead. It’s a galling fact, and I’m going to reflect on it a bit in this column. Estimates put the cost of the Iran war at $1 billion for each day of fighting, and there is no end in sight.

Mentally juxtaposing the cuts to our healthcare budgets under Trump with the costs of the Iran War suggests a grim realization about our president’s intent. Wars destroy infrastructure, blow up buildings, and wound and kill people in large numbers, including, as we have learned, young children at school. Taking away people’s health insurance inadvertently hurts individual people who are ill, and in the worst-case scenario, will kill them if their illness is serious enough.

Graduate Nurses Are Professionals, and Are Needed
January 2026

As nurses reading this column surely already know, the Trump administration, via the Department of Education (DOE), recently downgraded the classification of graduate nursing degrees from “Professional” to “Graduate.” The recategorization is insulting to nurses, no question, and social media has been full of memes that describe nurses’ work or show pictures of loaded IV pumps with text saying, “Tell me I’m not a professional.”

The primary problem with the change, though, is that while it affronts nurses’ professionalism, it’s also likely to hurt patients. The change could contribute to the ongoing slow-motion implosion of our healthcare system by reducing the number of nurses with graduate degrees. The hit to nurses’ self-regard is bad, but patients being harmed due to a badly motivated change in a bureaucratic classification system is really intolerable.

Finally, some good news in health care
December 2025

There is plenty of bad news about health care these days — insurance companies refusing to pay for necessary care, astronomical drug prices, and hospital staff shortages — but there are still some reasons for hope. I first wrote about nurse staffing problems in The New York Times in 2010. Then, new research revealed a scary fact: When nurses are overworked, more patients die.

But recently in Pittsburgh, where I live, 860 registered nurses and advanced practice nurses at UPMC Magee-Women’s Hospital decided they’d had enough and voted to unionize, joining the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). As a nurse who has also worked too many shifts with too few staff, I can say that unions in health care are a reason for optimism.

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.