Patient care
Czerwiec’s narrative engages with the transformative effects of caregiving, in a setting that feels simultaneously continuous (she sees the same patients repeatedly) and fleeting, as these patients are either transferred elsewhere or die. The intensity of the day-to-day experience of these overlapping presences and passages is beautifully expressed throughout. One evening as she’s finishing her shift, Stephen, a dying patient, asks to be held. As Czerwiec recounts, his “oxygen mask hissed over my shoulder. He smelled of medicine. I felt bone, skin, cloth, heartbeat….I felt silenced, shaken. I felt awe.”