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In The Courage to Care best-selling author Christie Watson reveals the remarkable extent of nurses’ work. A community mental-health nurse choreographs support for a man suffering from severe depression. A teen with stab wounds is treated by the critical-care team; his school nurse visits and he drops the bravado. A pregnant woman loses frightening amounts of blood following a car accident; it is a military nurse who synchronises the emergency department into immaculate order and focus.

Christie Watson was a nurse for 20 years. Taking us from birth to death and from A&E to the mortuary, The Language of Kindness is an astonishing account of a profession defined by acts of care, compassion and kindness. We watch Christie as she nurses a premature baby who has miraculously made it through the night, we stand by her side during her patient's agonising heart-lung transplant and we hold our breath as she washes the hair of a child fatally injured in a fire, attempting to remove the toxic smell of smoke before the grieving family arrive.

In her early 20s, Christie Watson was convinced she'd found her soulmate, in a glowing flash of light that turned out to be her tealights setting her quilt on fire. Twenty years later, her bed is burning once again...as she wakes in a perimenopausal sweat, night after night. This is the story of her journey through mid-life: of the joy of letting go and the pain of the morning after, of the unstoppable power of female friendship and the struggle to raise teenagers as a single parent.

When Rowan was sixteen, she only tolerated communication from her mother in the form of Snapchat. Desperate to be closer to her daughter, Christie sent daily selfies of her face superimposed onto a chicken nugget. It took serious illness for them to finally talk – and truly listen. Rowan's mental health struggles revealed the chasm between their generations. They started being more honest with each other than they had ever been before: discussing identity, race and gender; opening up about disordered eating and self-harm; navigating the perils of social media.

Award-winning and internationally acclaimed author, writer and nurse Christie Watson joins us to introduce her latest audiobook, The Language of Kindness. An astonishing memoir which tracks her nursing career and the importance of treating others with respect, compassion and kindness, it has been lauded by the likes of Amnesty International and the Royal College of Nursing. In this interview we talk to Christie about the experiences that have stuck with her as a nurse, her hopes for better treatment and support for nurses, and the writing of this book.