Nurse Who Writes
About
R.E. Hengsterman is a registered nurse, a Pushcart Prize-nominated, award-winning fiction and non-fiction writer, and an educator with over thirty years of healthcare experience. Coming from a place that combines the clinical and the imaginative, his writings have appeared in more than fifty publications, including Across The Margin, Maudlin House, Bluntly Magazine, Eunoia Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Barren Magazine, Riggwelter, Phenomenal Literature, Former Cactus, The Airgonaut and The Blotter Magazine.
As a writer that navigates the fine line between storytelling and science, he brings empathy to the facts and story to the data.
The Award-winning - The Shift Worker’s Paradox is a work of narrative nonfiction that mingles science, the life experiences of its author, and no-nonsense advice to investigate the less obvious expenses of life against the clock. Well-known for bridging the divide between healthcare and storytelling, his writing has helped to raise empathy and understanding in the clinical world. At Nurse Who Writes, he also works to merge science and narrative to clear up and calm the waters of healthcare, and enhance patient care, and also self-reflection for healthcare workers and writers alike.
He holds a master’s degree in nursing education (MSN), Innovation, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship (M.E.), and the arts (MA). Inspired by Denis Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, and Alice Walker, his fiction aims for the heart, and his nonfiction works pursue mental clarity. He lives in North Carolina, splitting his time between research, storytelling and working the night shift.
The Shift Worker's Paradox
“Working nights doesn’t just steal your sleep—it rewrites your biology.”
Your body is hijacked by a different rhythm, and can be affected in various negative ways, when working night shifts. Well-known strategies for sleep, nutrition, and physical exercise won't cut it anymore, and won't shield you from the psychological toll of burnout, anxiety, and fatigue.
To tackle these problems, tools and techniques in The Shift Worker’s Paradox are provided to help you correct them, and long-term protective protocols address heart health, hormone balance, and more. You can get ready for your next shift by implementing small, actionable hacks that prepare you to face the challenges of shift work.
This book skillfully combines medical understanding, frontline narratives, and compassionate advice to offer more than just a survival strategy; it's a blueprint for reclaiming your health, performance, and overall happiness.
If you've ever asked yourself, "How do I make this work without wearing myself out?", this book has your back.
The value of your health shouldn't be the cost of your career.
If you've ever dragged yourself to work exhausted, or fell apart due to sleepless nights and wonder how long you could keep going, this book will be your roadmap, showing you how to shield your mind, body and spirit, even when the schedule is stacked against you, and if you enjoy Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker you will also enjoy this book, which gives strategies that are specifically geared towards night workers, has a similar style to Breath by James Nestor or How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which are hard hitting, story-driven books that come with very practical advice.
Coming home from a night shift is never pleasant, but The Shift Worker’s Paradox takes into account your reality as a nurse, a healthcare worker, or someone who works at night and provides actionable insights.
The Paper Boy & The Winter War
Thirty-Eight Stories of Flash Fiction
“These stories move like smoke through a half-lit room—boys turned men too soon, families split by silence, love and violence braided tight.
The Paper Boy & The Winter War is a book of bruised hearts and broken promises, written in a voice that will follow you long after you set it down.”
Above him, one of my mother’s spider plants dangled. A runner stretched toward him, patient, green, slow as breath. Sometimes I imagined it stroking his shoulder. Sometimes I wanted it to wind around his throat. - Trapped Air
She rises, straddles his naked body, arms spread like wings. She lowers her mouth to his, releases the roach. It slides down his throat, its chitinous body lodging in his windpipe, wings unfurling. His breath rattles, then stops. Minutes later, the insect returns. She slips it inside herself, opening in pleasure, making a nest of her own. - The Nest
She found comfort in the routine: staff bending his limbs against contractures, laying bony prominences on pillows as if into coffins. Pinned by the unknown, she sipped coffee in the still moments, watched long-timers clutch Bibles, watched newcomers beg for miracles. Sobriety brought memories back jagged: the unhappiness of her pregnancy, the infant who screamed himself blue, the marriage gone gray. - The Uknown
What Readers Are Saying
“I wish I had this book when I first started working nights. It would have saved me years of trial and error.”
Shawn T., Paramedic
The Shift Worker's Paradox
Speaking on Circadian-Aware Leadership™
Designing healthcare decisions around human biology, performance, and safety.
Healthcare leaders make decisions every day that affect staffing, workload, recovery, patient safety, retention, and financial performance. Too often, those decisions are made through an operational lens alone.
Circadian-Aware Leadership™ adds the missing layer: human biology.
This speaking platform helps healthcare leaders understand how fatigue, recovery, cognitive load, and operational support shape human performance.
The goal is not to ask clinicians to simply adapt to harder conditions. The goal is to help leaders design conditions where people can perform safely, consistently, and sustainably.
The Core Message
Before we ask, “Can our people adapt to this decision?”
Circadian-Aware Leaders ask: “How can we design this decision to maximize human performance and patient safety?”
Circadian-Aware Leadership™ reframes fatigue as more than a wellness issue. It is a leadership issue, a safety issue, a workforce issue, and an organizational performance issue.
When fatigue rises, recovery shrinks, and cognitive load increases, performance changes. Communication changes. Decision-making changes. Risk changes.
Leaders cannot control biology.
But leaders can design the conditions where biology performs.
Speaking Topics
Circadian-Aware Leadership™: A New Model for Healthcare Decision-Making
This keynote introduces the Circadian-Aware Leadership™ Decision Filter, a practical model for evaluating operational decisions through the lens of human performance, patient safety, and organizational outcomes.
The session explores how staffing changes, shift length, mandatory overtime, workflow redesign, policy changes, and recovery time create ripple effects across clinical performance and patient care.
Audience members will learn how to ask better leadership questions before implementing decisions that affect the people doing the work.
Fatigue Is Not a Character Flaw
Fatigue is often treated as an individual weakness. In healthcare, it is frequently normalized, minimized, or disguised as resilience.
This session challenges that mindset.
Participants will examine fatigue as a predictable biological response to workload, sleep disruption, cognitive demand, inadequate recovery, and circadian misalignment. The talk connects fatigue to clinical judgment, communication, medication safety, missed care, team performance, retention, and post-shift risk.
This is not a lecture about working harder.
It is a framework for leading smarter.
The Ripple Effect of Leadership Decisions
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Every decision creates a ripple.
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A staffing change affects fatigue.
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Fatigue affects cognitive load.
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Cognitive load affects clinical performance.
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Clinical performance affects safety, experience, retention, and financial outcomes.
This session helps leaders see beyond the immediate operational fix and recognize the downstream effects of decisions on people, teams, patients, and the organization.
Recovery as a Leadership Strategy
Recovery is often treated as personal responsibility. Circadian-Aware Leadership™ reframes recovery as an operational safety requirement.
This session explores how shift design, time between shifts, breaks, vacation access, overtime patterns, and workload intensity shape the ability of healthcare workers to recover and return safely.
The message is simple: a system that consumes recovery also consumes performance.
Ideal Audiences
This speaking platform is designed for healthcare organizations, nursing leaders, hospital executives, safety teams, quality leaders, educators, occupational health professionals, and workforce development teams.
It is especially relevant for organizations struggling with burnout, turnover, staffing shortages, overtime dependence, patient safety concerns, workplace fatigue, or declining engagement.
What Audiences Will Learn
Participants will leave with a practical framework for evaluating decisions before they become safety risks.
They will learn how to recognize fatigue accumulation, protect recovery, reduce unnecessary cognitive load, and identify leading indicators that predict downstream problems.
They will also learn how to use leadership levers such as work design, workload management, communication, recovery protection, and environmental support to improve outcomes.
Circadian-Aware Leadership™ helps organizations move toward:
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Safer care through fewer errors, stronger teamwork, and better decision-making.
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Healthier teams through lower burnout, better recovery, and improved retention.
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Better patient experience through more consistent communication and safer clinical performance.
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Stronger financial performance through reduced turnover, less overtime, lower risk, and more sustainable operations.
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More resilient organizations prepared for the future of healthcare work.