Heather is pale and thin, seventeen and pregnant with twins when
Patricia Harman begins to care for her. Over the course of the next five
seasons Patsy will see Heather through the loss of both babies and their
father. She will also care for her longtime patient Nila, pregnant for
the eighth time and trying to make a new life without her abusive
husband. And Patsy will try to find some comfort to offer Holly, whose
teenage daughter struggles with bulimia. She will help Rebba learn to
find pleasure in her body and help Kaz transition into a new body. She
will do noisy battle with the IRS in the very few moments she has to
spare, and wage her own private battle with uterine cancer.
Patricia Harman, a nurse-midwife, manages a women's health clinic with
her husband, Tom, an ob-gyn, in West Virginia-a practice where patients
open their hearts, where they find care and sometimes refuge. Patsy's
memoir juxtaposes the tales of these women with her own story of keeping
a small medical practice solvent and coping with personal challenges.
Her patients range from Appalachian mothers who haven't had the
opportunity to attend secondary school to Ph.D.'s on cell phones. They
come to Patsy's small, windowless exam room and sit covered only by blue
cotton gowns, and their infinitely varied stories are in equal parts
heartbreaking and uplifting. The nurse-midwife tells of their lives over
the course of a year and a quarter, a time when her outwardly successful
practice is in deep financial trouble, when she is coping with
malpractice threats, confronting her own serious medical problems, and
fearing that her thirty-year marriage may be on the verge of collapse.
In the words of Jacqueline Mitchard, this memoir, "utterly true and
lyrical as any novel...should be a little classic."
