Shalof’s compassion and aptitude starts in childhood as her mother’s caregiver. She tends to her mother’s health with an understanding greater than her young age and an anger appropriate for her circumstances. She struggles between caring for her mother’s every need to resenting her mother’s illnesses and dependence. A nursing opportunity in Israel provides a jumpstart to nursing -- and some much-needed emotional and physical distance from her mother.

Her new life screeches to a halt, however, when her mother’s condition deteriorates. Back in the U.S., Shalof loses her mother and her quest for nursing. The compassionate, intelligent woman becomes a street urchin without a home, career or family. In desperation to grasp at real life again, she returns to her passion and becomes a nurse in an Intensive Care Unit, a nursing place like no other.

Over the years, Shalof questions her reasons for pursuing nursing, heals personal losses and takes an active role in the future of nursing. She contemplates the question of which emotion makes her a better nurse: compassion or distance towards her patients. If compassion makes a good nurse, then what happens when your patients and the work completely overwhelm your life? When compassion and medical knowledge are foundations for the job, can you turn those off at the end of a workday?

The Making of a Nurse is a powerful testament to the complexities of nursing. Shalof writes her biography with the grace of a novel while unfolding medical intricacies and nursing life. Readers will stand bedside and watch patients dangle between life and death. Shalof shares nursing experiences with the directness of someone blind to illnesses, accidents, and death. The beauty is that she is not blind to suffering; she is experienced in helping others. Nurses and laypeople will smile and cry during her tender stories and her personal growth. Readers will come away with a greater understanding of what it means to be a nurse.

Her story is more than the making of a nurse; it is the making of something in short supply: a truly giving human that makes the world worth living.