Death Just Happens

This is an inspirational memoir by a Registered Nurse, whose career ended with one incident and diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, after a string of trauma victims in a Australian rural hospital mortuary. The search for her identity without nursing will take you through her childhood memories, her adventures as a bush nurse in a remote ski resort, travels abroad, and the adversity faced with an injured husband raising three toddlers. Using her father’s wisdom and her strong beliefs, life comes full circle reminding us we can overcome death, loss and labels by living life.share this story that took her on full circle and has to be told, so others can overcome tough times combating death and labels by living life.

BOOK REVIEW

The memoir of an accomplished bush nurse and nursing supervisor; inspired by the career-ending encounter with a particularly gruesome death.

Scott’s memoir opens with her receiving a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder a condition induced by her first-hand exposure to the severely damaged corpse of a swimmer. Facing the prospect of not returning to work, Scott ruminates on her life leading up to that moment. She takes us through her happy girlhood on a farm, painting lush imagery one of the book’s strong suits. The young Margaret makes for an endearing presence; the forbearance and no-nonsense work ethic that will later assist her is evident in her youth. While Scott shares a few relevant memories from farm life such as the bandage she instinctively created when her father lost a finger and the demise of various animals many events, described at length, distract from the central theme. The author covers her decision to enter nursing (strongly colored by her desire to travel via bush nursing), her early schooling and the acquisition of her first nursing jobs. While details concerning the niche brand of skier-injury nursing she’s acquainted with in her pioneering work at a remote resort are interesting in their own right, they’re not well blended with the book’s main focus, and the inclusion of the non-nursing-related minutiae of her many travels and friendships take the narrative further from an examination of the psychological toll inherent in regularly confronting death. A purported brush with telepathic communication serves to jolt focus from practical nursing entirely. Suffering from a lack of integration with the rest of the memoir’s subject matter, this instance brings the credibility of surrounding observations into question. Scott’s return, in the final chapter, to the aphorism that death “just happens” should inspire one to live emphatically, but it feels forced rather than a graceful punctuation of the grand arc of her story. Also, Scott’s sentence structure throughout much of the book is confused in terms of subject-verb agreement, tense and singularity/plurality, which makes the text unnecessarily challenging.

Scott covers independently interesting topics, but the book would greatly benefit from improved focus and grammatical polishing.

-Kirkus Discoveries

Post-traumatic stress disorder is commonly assumed to be an unwelcome souvenir of battle, but PTSD also affects people who have never heard a bomb explode or a rifle shot fired in anger. Margaret J. Scott enjoyed most of her duties as a respected and hard-working nursing supervisor in an Australian hospital. What she didn’t realize was the enormous strain her job put on her psyche.

Apparently, after studying the hospital mortuary stats with the hospital’s occupational health and safety officer, the numbers I had been involved in were excessive; I was supposed to have snapped years prior. He went on to say I had been working a 93 percent rate of trauma; the analogy he used was, in [Beirut], Lebanon, the medical and nursing are monitored to work only 30 percent trauma in any given year. I had been doing this for over fifteen