Still Showing Up: A Memoir of Nursing, Service, and the Long Work of Care
Kenneth Lee Canter Dabbs
Synopsis "Still Showing Up: A Memoir of Nursing, Service, and the Long Work of Care"
For more than forty-five years, Kenneth Lee Dabbs walked through the doors where people needed care most: locked psychiatric wards, intensive care units, military aircraft, research hospitals, veterans’ clinics, farmworker health programs, homebound patients’ living rooms, and primary care exam rooms during public health crises.Still Showing Up is the powerful memoir of a nurse, veteran flight nurse, nurse practitioner, educator, and patient advocate whose career carried him from construction work into the heart of American healthcare. With honesty, compassion, humor, and courage, Dabbs reflects on the patients who shaped him, the systems that challenged him, the outbreaks that tested him, and the moments when advocacy became as important as medicine itself.This is a story of service in its many forms: holding pressure on a bleeding artery, caring for patients with HIV/AIDS during years of fear and stigma, flying in C-130 aircraft as a military nurse, supporting public health in underserved communities, treating veterans, making house calls, teaching future nurse practitioners, and confronting the failures of modern healthcare systems.At its center, Still Showing Up is about what it means to keep entering the room—again and again—with skill, conscience, humility, humor, and heart.For readers who appreciate moving medical memoirs, stories of public service, nursing, veterans’ care, LGBTQ+ resilience, and the human side of healthcare, this book offers an intimate look at a life. Read more