Condition Critical

Critical care nurse Heron will make readers laugh and cry with this graphic, often shocking look at life in the trenches of an unidentified high-tech hospital in San Francisco. A sequel to her bestselling Intensive Care , the book describes her daily struggle to be a healer and nurturer, and maintain her dignity, in a world of money-grubbing hospital administrations, arrogant, condescending male doctors, 12-hour ``zombie shifts'' and doubled workloads. Heron writes with emotional intensity and sassy humor as she critiques the hospital's corner-cutting bureaucracy, tells what it's like to be the divorced single mother of a moody adolescent son and relates her affair with a neighbor 14 years younger than she. Close to burnout, she quits the profession and moves to the West Indies with her cat, Mooshie--leaving her son behind--but one hopes she will keep writing. First serial to Glamour; Literary Guild alternate; author tour. (July)