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A Splendid Gift

Published by Indigo River Publishing
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE ₹570.00

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About The Book

“A forthright, poignant, and heartwarming account of a storied and beloved career in nursing.” – Kirkus Reviews

“...a powerful memoir that holds the uncommon ability to transcend personal experience alone…” – Midwest Book Review

A Splendid Gift: Celebrating 60 Years in Nursing tells the story of Barbara Elle Prisceaux, who turned a childhood dream into an extraordinary career.

As a young girl in Yonkers, New York, Barbara was drawn to the nurses walking from their residence at the end of her block to the hospital several streets away. She decided then and there that she would become a nurse too by age fifteen, when her family was living in West Lawn Pennsylvania, she accepted a part-time nurse’s aide position at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Reading, and she bused twenty miles each way after school, and sometimes, on weekends. At eighteen, she was accepted into the School of Nursing at Bellevue Hospital, Class of 1962.

Including two enlistments in the Army Nurse Corps Reserves, Barbara spent most of her career on the West Coast. In 2003, she moved from California to Central Florida and changed her patient care focus from Emergency and Critical Care to Oncology Nursing.

Combining her nursing career with her love of writing, Barbara developed and coordinated educational programs in Critical Care; designed legal defense protocols for Renal Transplant litigations; cofounded Paper Chasers Medical-Legal Consultations; edited documents for Northern California District Attorneys Association, and as an Oncology Certified Nurse in Florida, specialized in clinical research and advocacy for oncology patients and their families.

Throughout her six-decade career, Barbara met challenge after challenge head-on, from ever-changing technology to hospital politics. When she retired at the age of seventy-seven, she was working two 12-hour shifts each week, providing hands-on care to patients in a medical center eighty miles from her home.

About The Author

Barbara Elle Prisceaux is a retired nurse, a writer, and a lifelong learner. After graduating from Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City in 1962, she spent the next forty years on the West Coast of the United States pursuing her career. Along the way, she married, had three children, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and Creative Writing, as well as a Juris Doctor degree in law.

In 2003, Barbara moved with her newly retired husband to the Space Coast of Central Florida. Widowed in 2019, she remains in Central Florida, where she is working on Seeker of Everyday Magic, stories of life and loving. She plans to devote this latest chapter of her life inspiring her readers to laugh, to choose with no regrets, to do what they love, and live as if this is all there is.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Indigo River Publishing (September 19, 2023)
  • Length: 196 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781954676541

Raves and Reviews

...a powerful memoir that holds the uncommon ability to transcend personal experience alone, adding to its value the elements of charting a history of the changing medical community and its standards of care…Libraries and readers seeking insights into these pivot points, what influenced them, and how nurses adapted to and embraced constantly-changing duties and roles will find

A Splendid Gift an informational, celebratory, appreciative examination of nurses and their world.” – Midwest Book Review

“In this memoir, a veteran healthcare worker shares inspirational adventures from her long career.

For as long as she could remember, Prisceaux always wanted to be a nurse. In her heartfelt, anecdotal book, she recalls growing up in Yonkers in awe of nursing revolutionary Florence Nightingale and how she “wanted to be just like her.” As a teenager, her bouts with paralyzing shyness soon vanished once she pursued a nurse’s aide job at a local hospital in the Philadelphia suburb where her family had relocated. Prisceaux emerged as a determined, goal-oriented young woman aiming her sights on New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Center and School of Nursing in 1959 (costing only $200). Even falling down a flight of stairs at the Port Authority on the morning of her admission interview couldn’t derail her. She describes her school years in animated detail, recalling working as a nurse “determined to survive every curve thrown at me in this strange new world I found myself in.” A naturally engaging storyteller, Prisceaux stuffs her memoir with anecdotes, stories, opinions, and seasoned perspectives, spanning the best and worst moments of the author’s 60-year nursing career. Among the more resonant highlights are memories of the first time she sponge-bathed a smirking male patient at the age of 18 and the whirlwind months spent in the Army Nurse Corps, only to then fall madly in love, get married, and welcome her daughter Laura Mary in 1964. As a young nurse, the author agonized over the accidental deaths of patients she’d attended to in the emergency room or intensive care ward. But with experience and numerous relocations, and despite marital discord and the exhaustive mothering of three children, the author became admired and respected as a nursing “road warrior.” Prisceaux closely observed the health care industry evolve across its medical, political, and technological landscapes. She remarks with great insight and knowledge about the seemingly never-ending series of changes that continued to take place in modern medicine. Nurses in general—as well as those suffering from career burnout—will find much inspiration and encouragement in the author’s tender, droll, humorous, and immensely moving stories about the intense work regimen, the personal struggles, and the often bittersweet but fulfilling patient interactions.

A forthright, poignant, and heartwarming account of a storied and beloved career in nursing.– Kirkus Reviews

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