Book Review: A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary by Nurse T and Timothy Sheard

Reading A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary, particularly against prevalent media representations of health care workers’ experiences during this pandemic, brought to mind for me the opening words of the sketch by the U.S. radical writer Jesús Colón, “Something to Read,” from his collection A Puerto Rican in New York, in which he describes “a piece of working class literature, a pamphlet, a progressive book or pamphlet” as “precious things.” Authored by a nurse who just goes by Nurse T, along with Timothy Sheard, himself a former nurse, A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary is in fact “something to read.” It provides not only an incisive record of health care workers’ experiences of the pandemic at this moment but also offers a deeper analysis from a worker’s perspective into U.S. class society and how it impacts people’s health and the delivery of health care in the United States. Additionally, what makes this work most “precious,” distinguishing it as working-class literature, is that it addresses workers and the workplace traumas they endure directly, an issue rarely covered in our nation’s literature. As the process of vaccinating the U.S. population against COVID-19 is underway, promising visibility and hope for an end to the pandemic, Nurse T’s diary stresses that while vaccinations may provide some protection from the virus, the pandemic has also exacerbated and drawn into relief longstanding and deeply rooted social ills, often structural in nature, that cannot be cured by any vaccination, no matter how powerful. I found Nurse T’s explanations and analyses of “hospital poverty” one of the most illuminating aspects of the diary. She, of course, highlights that “poor patients— especially Black and Hispanic patients—are way more likely to die from COVID than their White counterparts” because “poverty has given them multiple co-morbidities, like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and asthma.”While I knew something of these health disparities conditioned by our racist class system, I was less aware of how the capitalist political economy and class system impacted the functioning of hospitals. At one point, one of Nurse T’s colleagues expresses not being bitter, but just tired: “Tired of the shortages and the outdated equipment. Tired of the politicians protesting they can’t afford to raise our reimbursement rates. Tired of the government —city, state, and federal—funneling resources to the gold-plated medical centers in Book Reviews