Angie Wang for NPR
After years working as a nurse in critical care units, Anne Webster found herself lying in the hospital struggling to get well. She had been given the wrong dose of a chemotherapy medication to treat Crohn’s disease. The mistake had caused her bone marrow to shut down, and she’d developed pneumonia.
As she lay in the hospital, she thought, “If I live, I’m gonna write about this.”
After three weeks, she recovered. And the experience led Webster to write Chemo Brain, a poem about how the drug scrambled her thinking.
Poetry, she says, has a way of trimming “away every extraneous word until the essence shines through.”
These days, she writes essays and poetry full-time. Webster’s first collection of poems, A History of Nursing, was nominated for a 2008 National Book Award. She’s currently working on a second anthology and a novel about a nurse involved in a murder mystery.
“I’m a nurse,” she says. “It’s what I know.”
Listen to Anne Webster read her poem
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