In this episode of The Bossy Nurse Podcast, Marsha Battee speaks with Theresa Brown, PhD, BSN, RN, nurse, writer, and New York Times bestselling author, whose storytelling has reshaped how the public understands nursing. Her journey from academia to oncology nursing, and from bedside notes to national platforms, reveals how powerful a single nurse’s voice can be.
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Key takeaways
- Writing can be a powerful tool for processing clinical experiences and giving voice to nurses’ invisible work.
- Theresa’s first New York Times essay opened national doors because it revealed a bedside perspective seldom heard.
- A single shift can capture the emotional, clinical, and relational complexity of nursing in a way readers deeply recognize.
- Becoming a patient reshaped Theresa’s understanding of healthcare and exposed gaps that clinicians often overlook.
- Bullying in nursing is widespread, but often solvable only through changing units, not waiting for leadership to intervene.
Show notes / what you’ll hear in this episode
- Early Influences: Theresa reflects on growing up with rigid gender expectations and how academia originally shaped her ambitions.
- A Shift Toward Nursing: She shares how becoming a mother and receiving attentive care from midwives sparked her desire to transition into nursing.
- Leaving Academia: Theresa explains why she left teaching: the isolation she felt in academia and the pull toward work rooted in human connection.
- Toxic Beginnings: She describes the bullying she faced, why leadership often fails to intervene, and how changing units saved her career.
- Writing Through Trauma: Theresa discusses writing about a sudden patient death initially as a way to ease intrusive memories and how that essay unexpectedly led to agents and a book deal.
- Birth of Her Books: She walks through how Critical Care came together and how The Shift grew from a single idea: showing “all the life” of nursing.
- Why It Resonates: Marsha and Theresa explore why The Shift resonates so deeply with both nurses and patients, revealing the real cadence, interruptions, emotions, and decisions woven into every shift.
- Becoming the Patient: Theresa explains how becoming a cancer patient exposed system failures that clinicians often overlook—and why she refused to sugarcoat the experience in her book Healing.
- Her Next Chapter: She shares a preview of her fourth book, which investigates places across the country delivering exceptional care and the payment structures that threaten their survival.
Resources mentioned
- Perhaps Death is Proud: More Reasons to Savor Life: The 2008 New York Times essay that launched Theresa’s writing career.
- Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between
- The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives
- Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient
- The Midwife Center (Pittsburgh)
- Housecall Providers (Portland)
- Bellevue Literary Review
- Substack (for nurse writers)
Where to find Theresa online
- Website: https://www.theresabrown.com (sign up for her newsletter here)
- Substack: https://theresabrown.substack.com
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/TheresaBrown
Bio: Theresa Brown, PhD, BSN, RN
Theresa Brown, PhD, BSN, RN, is a nurse and writer who lives in Pittsburgh. Her third book–Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient–will be available April 2022. 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.
Timestamps (selected)
- 00:00 — Theresa’s early life and rigid expectations in Missouri
- 13:00 — Motherhood, midwives, and the spark that led to nursing
- 22:00 — Entering oncology and facing unit culture challenges
- 31:00 — The story she wrote down to “get it out of her head”
- 43:00 — The book deal that launched her writing career
- 1:01:00 — Becoming a patient and seeing healthcare differently
- 1:06:00 — Seeking hope in healthcare for her fourth book
