Reviews

From ForeWord Reviews
Three Stars (out of Five)

 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 years.

Early in the memoir, readers vicariously experience the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” As part of her responsibilities, Scott, a dedicated caregiver, was charged with preparing and presenting human remains whenever officials or family needed to view them. With years of medical experience in trauma care, Scott didn’t expect anything to faze her. Then she found herself under time pressure to prepare the body of a drowned swimmer for family identification.

Our nostrils and eyes were slammed with the visual of the entire front torso in a skeletal state filled with sea creatures, the jackals of the sea, that had been doing their job … I involuntarily vomited, an experience new to me.

So begins Death Just Happens. Scott does a creditable job describing her hard work and thoroughly stressful responsibilities.

Scott then moves into a description of her childhood, one as a rural Australian dairy farmer’s daughter, which she believes prepared her for the nursing profession. It’s apparent she is a natural Type-A personality. Even as a child, she seemed competent and disciplined beyond her years, even to the point of being able to apply an effective tourniquet when her father lost part of a finger in a farming accident.

Margaret the Mute, as she was labeled in school because of her shyness, then enrolled in nursing school, took advanced training in midwifery, moved to “the big smoke” (vernacular for an Australian metropolis), returned to her native area to become a first responder at Mount Baw Baw ski resort and traveled during the resort’s off-season. She worked in a castle in England, was entertained by a famous clothing designer in Paris, sojourned in South Africa, and spent a month touring the American West before settling into marriage. All this is told with great gusto. The memoir ends with both Scott and her husband triumphing over severe cases of mercury poisoning.

Scott was trained as a nurse rather than a writer, and that fact is illustrated in some of her syntax and use of grammar. As an example, she writes “Dad was ashen, with the gray color of his hair with an unusual silence.” A professional editor would have given the book polish, but it stands as an appealing retelling of a life well-lived.

For those who treasure listening to a friend’s adventures within an exciting life story, this book will intrigue.

Gary Presley

 

From Kirkus

 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.