In this searing, honest memoir, a Black queer emergency-room nurse works the front lines of care during COVID-19.
“Can I have a white nurse?” the patient asked Britney Daniels.
“Sorry ma'am,” Britney replied, “we are fresh out of white nurses.”
Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much.
We are fortunate that Daniels is now willing to share these stories with us. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories, told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, make visible the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived. Whether it is giving one’s own clothes to a homeless patient, sticking up for patients of color in the face of indifference from white doctors and nurses, or nursing one’s own back pain accrued from transporting too many bodies as the morgues overflowed during the pandemic, Journal of a Black Queer Nurse reveals the ways in which care is much more than treating a physical body and how the commitment to real care–care that involves listening to and understanding patients in a deeper sense–demands nurses, especially nurses of color, must also be warriors.
