A career of kindness - Christie Watson on nurse's lives

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Well what a strange time we’re living through. I don’t what I can say that hasn’t already been said. So to some extent this episode is a distraction - something interesting to listen to from a profession that is always in our highest regard in times like this but too easily forgotten in easy times.

Christie Watson is a trained nurse who spent 20 years working in hospitals across London. 

She’s an Incredible testament to never allowing your creative spark to die. She explains to me how she wrote her first book - an award winning novel while studying a course in creative writing and working as a nurse - and also being a single mother. 

The novel won the immensely prestigious Costa Book Award (a prize she didn’t know she was nominated for). Brilliantly she had to Google the prize when she got called to say she’d won it.

Her book The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story is a remarkable tale of a job right in the heart of anxious families while retaining professional distance. I was interested what the job of nurse was like.

We talk about privilege - mainly mine that I found her book so eyeopening about areas that i was oblivious to.

It’s a beautiful account that has become a best seller because of the sympathy that runs through it. In one episode chrissie washes the hair of a recently deceased patient so that the smell of the burning that killed them won’t pollute the family’s last moment

Christie's book A Language of Kindness.

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