Nurse Who Writes
Dear Reader,
You had many choices about what to read, where to spend your time, and whose voice to invite into your life. You chose mine.
That means more to me than I can fully express.
Thank you.
My writing begins where healthcare, science, and lived experience meet. After more than three decades in nursing, I have learned that some of the most important stories unfold beyond public view—under fluorescent lights at 3 a.m., inside overcrowded emergency departments, beside patients who are waiting, and among healthcare workers carrying more than any system should ask them to hold.
The Shift Worker’s Paradox grew out of more than ten years of night shifts and witnessing what happens when biology collides with workplace demands. It examines fatigue, circadian disruption, and the physical cost of living against the body’s natural rhythm. More importantly, it offers practical strategies for people who cannot simply walk away from the schedules that support their families and keep essential services running.
The Deadly Wait turns toward another crisis—the growing danger inside America’s emergency care system. It examines overcrowding, boarding, staffing shortages, delayed treatment, and the patients who enter emergency departments seeking rescue but find themselves trapped in clinical limbo. The book asks a difficult question: What happens when the place designed to save us no longer has the capacity to respond?
Although these books examine different problems, they share one purpose: to make complicated issues understandable without stripping away their human consequences.
I write for the worker trying to remain healthy through another night shift. I write for the nurse attempting to provide safe care inside an unsafe system. I write for the patient waiting for someone to recognize that time matters. I write for leaders willing to confront what is failing instead of asking frontline professionals to absorb one more burden.
Most of all, I write because words can name what people have felt but could not always explain.
If something in these pages helped you understand your body, your profession, your healthcare system, or your own experience more clearly, then these words accomplished what I hoped they would.
Thank you for reading my words—and for carrying the conversation forward
—R.E. Hengsterman, MSN, MA, M.E., RN