TINY SUNBIRDS FAR AWAY

THE COURAGE TO CARE

Nurses have never been more important. We benefit from their expertise in our hospitals and beyond: in our schools, on our streets, in prisons, hospices and care homes. When we feel most alone, nurses remind us that we are not alone at all. In The Courage to Care best-selling author Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses’ work. A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression. A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado. A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus.Christie makes a further discovery: that, time and again, it is patients and their families - including her own - who show exceptional strength in the most challenging times. We are all deserving of compassion, and as we share in each other’s suffering, Christie Watson shows us how we can find courage too. The courage to care.

THE LANGUAGE OF KINDNESS: A NURSE'S STORY

Christie Watson was a nurse for twenty years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, this is her astounding account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness.

QUILT ON FIRE: THE MESSY MAGIC OF MIDLIFE

In her early 20s, Christie Watson was convinced she'd found her soulmate, in a glowing flash of light that turned out to be her tealights setting her quilt on fire. Twenty years later, her bed is burning once again...as she wakes in a perimenopausal sweat, night after night. This is the story of her journey through mid-life: of the joy of letting go and the pain of the morning after, of the unstoppable power of female friendship and the struggle to raise teenagers as a single parent. It lays bare the exhilaration, agony, wonder and fears of being a middle-aged woman with a wild heart, a changing body and a new set of challenges. And as her world takes on a different shape, there's something else she starts to feel: the hot flush of possibility.