S3 EP 137: Mary P. Fisher, Author of The Other Side of Nursing - Lessons I Learned from my Patients

Hello Happy People,

Mary Paula Fisher has had an extensive career in healthcare as a registered nurse. While her career was mainly focused on critical care and ICU nursing, Mary also worked with visiting nurses, hospice, and end-of-life care. These experiences led her to broaden her skill set beyond the basic medical training provided through mainstream programs. She was able to explore the benefits of more holistic healing techniques. 

Mary became an Usui Reiki Master Teacher after attending the Four Winds Society, School of Energy Healing. Since 2013, Mary has been able to utilize her new mastery to provide health education and healing programs, teaching various health and well-being techniques to corporate clients, healthcare employees, and interested individuals. Throughout her nursing career, Mary has had many memorable encounters with the patients in her care.

Mary started her book project around 2015 while she was still working as a nurse. Due to her demanding career, she was not able to devote significant time to her writing. Once she retired from nursing in May of 2023, she shifted her focus to her writing career and to finishing her memoir. 

Mary credits advice she got from individuals she met through the Cape Cod Writers Groups for influencing her decision to go the independent publishing route instead of seeking a traditional publisher. Besides providing her with beneficial career advice, the group hosted a five-day writers conference where Mary connected with another member of the group who became her mentor and great friend.

To find out more just click to listen to Mary's interview and get all the amazing details from the author herself. Don't wait, go listen now! 

Want to meet Mary in person, check out her first book signing:
Sunday, 29 September, Noon - 2:00 PM at Barnes & Noble in Wareham, MA.

Mary's Website​​
Mary on Amazon
Book Signing Sept. 29, 2024

Frankfurt Buchmesse 2024 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people! I hope you're all having a wonderful day today. It is, of course, September 25th, 2024, and today is such a great day, not just because we've got a fabulous author for you, as always, but today is also my little for baby's birthday. My dog Shaggy, who is a rescue from Russia, is nine years old today, and he's going to be getting a very special liver cake for dinner tonight. And I'm sure you're all thrilled about that. But for us, it's a very special event because we do just love our little boy. Anyway, I do want to take a moment to remind you, in case you haven't been following along in all of the episodes, we did have to record a bunch of the interviews for the rest of this season early. We did all of them in August. And that is because I'm going to be going in for shoulder surgery, and I will have to take a lot of time off here in the next couple of months. So whenever we're talking about publication dates, please be sure to pay attention to the dates that books are coming out because most often in the books that we're going to be talking about the next several episodes, they will be out and available for you to purchase by the time you hear this interview. Besides that, today we have got so much else going on. We're gonna hold that off until after the interview. You're going to love this. Today we have another one of our memoir authors who not only is a poet who you might have seen in a previous issue of Book Vantor magazine with her poem When forsythia's Bloom, but she also has written a fantastic memoir called The Other Side of Nursing: Lessons I Learned from My Patients. Now, I do need to add in a quick little addendum to this episode. We are speaking today with a medical professional, and there are many things that we discuss that have to do with her experience in medicine as a professional and specifically to the health issues that I have and have had to deal with over my lifetime and different treatments that she has used or I have tried. Please note we are not giving anyone medical advice. We are not suggesting that anyone else try the things that we are discussing. This is just pertaining to myself and to her experience in the medical profession. So please do not take anything in today's episode as medical advice. If you have any questions about your own medical conditions and treatments, please see your own qualified medical professional to get specific advice for you and your specific conditions. Now, that being said, I really want to get into this. She's somebody that you're going to identify with so well, and you're going to love her. So let's not waste any more time, but be sure to stick around till the very end because I have got so many announcements for you. It is absolutely crazy. Okay. Things are happening here. So without any more blather from me at this moment, please welcome to Book Banter with Diane Burkhart, Mary P. Fisher. The way that I usually like to start all of these interviews is I just ask my guests to please tell our audience who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Okay, sounds fair enough. Well, my name is Mary Paula Fisher. I'm a registered nurse. I've been a registered nurse for a very long time. I have worked mostly in critical care, meaning the emergency department or ICU, but I've done a lot of other things as well, such as visiting nurses and hospice. So over the years I started to keep track of some of the interesting patients that I took care of. I didn't want to forget them. So I kept a journal and I wrote about my experience with these patients. And then I had quite a few of them. And I said, wouldn't it be interesting to compile all of these into a book and have it be kind of a memoir? I actually didn't come to that conclusion probably till a couple of years ago. I was just going to put a bunch of them together and have them be just a book about what it's like to be a nurse.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

So now your book is The Other Side of Nursing, Lessons I Learned from My Patients. How long were you thinking about this project before you actually brought it to fruition?

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So I started this project probably nine years ago, and I was still working at the time. And so it did get put on the shelf for quite a bit of time because I was very, very busy. But then I retired. My last job, I was doing two jobs at the same time. I was teaching. I'd been teaching for 15 years clinically. So I would have students up on the actual hospital floor and I would teach them how to do basic fundamentals of nursing. Then I, at the same time, I was working for hospice and doing some visits, you know, maybe nine or 10 visits a week. And so I retired from doing that a year ago, May, and I decided to try to put all of this stuff together. Well, it was very complicated. I I didn't know how to do it. I've never done this before. So I went to a writers conference last summer in August. I lived down in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and I joined the Cape Cod Writers Group, which is just a wonderful group of people that are doing kind of the same thing that I've been doing, some of much more adept at it than I have been. I'm a newbie.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

So how helpful do you think this writers' conference and your writers group have been in your whole process?

SPEAKER_00 5:51

I learned so much from this conference. It was a four-day conference in Hyannis, and I just came back from there with so much information. And and I met this woman who I just became attached to. She was she and I have become friends, and she is now my editor. Uh Diane O'Connell is her name. She's been absolutely wonderful, kind of tutoring me along the way and telling me what to do. And she was pretty tough. Like she'd send something back to me and say, you know, this is this is not clear. You need to clarify this whole section. And I'd say, okay. And I I tend to write in nurse talk, which my book, it's aimed for lay people. It's not necessarily supposed to be for nurses or physicians or anything like that. It's supposed to be just to relay the experiences that I had with these patients to anybody that's interested in reading it. So she was wonderful. And I deferred to her for every decision I had to make because she's she's done it for years and she knows what she's talking about. And she is a layperson. She said, I couldn't understand what you said here. And she said, So I want you to to clarify that. So I did, and we were coming towards the end. I had the rough draft done. I thought it was done. And I I had edited it. I swear it hit was like a hundred times by then, but I couldn't come up with a title.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Sorry, I'm laughing because almost every person I interview, one of the hardest parts about doing a book on any topic for any author is writing the blurb and coming up with a title. It seems like it's a universal problem. How did you solve this?

SPEAKER_00 7:31

So I said, Diane, can you help me? What do you think the title should be? And she said, Oh, no, no, no. That's got to come from you. And I said, I I have a list of potentials and I can't decide which one. And she said, It'll come to you. You'll be reading one of these stories or rereading them, and all of a sudden it'll come to you. And it did. I was reading one of the stories over again. And the final sentence was, This was a valuable lesson that I learned from this patient. So that turned out to be the title of my book, uh, The Other Side of Nursing, Lessons I've Learned from My Patients. What Diane had said on one of the stories, she sent me a text back and she said, How did this make you feel going through this experience with this patient? And it really made me scratch my head to think about, well, how did this make me feel? And so I wrote a little blurb at the end of the story and I expressed how it made me feel. It was very emotional. Some of the stories are really funny, and some of the stories are pretty factual and just to give somebody an idea of what it's like to be a nurse. But some of them are very poignant and very heartbreaking, actually. So this was one of them. And I wrote back to her how it made me feel. It was it was a very emotional experience for me. So she sent me a note back and she said, okay, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go back to the beginning and at every story, which there's about 50 of them, I think, she said, I want you to write a little blurb after each one and relate how did that story make you feel? Or what lesson did you learn from that story? So that's how this subtitle came to be lessons I've learned from my patients. And so I said, Oh my gosh, this book's driving me crazy now. I've I've read through it probably a thousand times. I'm getting tired of it now. But I did exactly what she told me. And when I finished with it, I said, This is really good. I'm so proud of it. It was very hard to do that because I went through and almost relived some of these stories over and over again, but it was the right thing to do. And it she has really guided me in a wonderful way. I'm so proud of it.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

You have had such a great and varied experience as being a nurse. When did you actually start your nursing career?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

I started my nursing career in 1971.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

So there's been a lot of advances in the field since you began. What was that like going through all of the changes as things progressed with your patients?

SPEAKER_00 10:04

It was a continual learning experience. It was every day I would learn something new. And some days it was very difficult, some days it wasn't so difficult. And as I progressed along this road, the learning curve became a little less. And what I found was much more predominant was learning all the technical stuff. When computers came in, which was, you know, maybe 15 years ago. Nursing really changed. Nursing evolved a lot during that period of time. And nursing became much more technical. So that's when it became a little harder. It was maybe 15 or 20 years ago that I found every day I had to learn something new about the technicalities of what was being introduced to us. And at that time also, I was in the management part of it. So I had to keep track of what my nurses were doing. I had a staff of about 70. Oh, wow. And I had to keep track of what they were doing and making sure that the outcomes were really what we wanted to see. But I also had to learn all these technicalities about computer programs and the other end of computer programs, what the insurance companies were looking for, all the data that they were extracting from the computers. So that was a challenge for me anyway. And now the young nurses have much less difficulty than I did because they're so computer savvy. So what I'm finding is that the hands-on stuff is what's difficult for them. What I consider the essence of nursing, nursing is that difficult to define process that we use to take care of patients, to help them heal. So a lot of my stories highlight that. That was when I was evolving into this, into the management part of it. And so it highlights the difference.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

One of the things I want to clarify too, because you have a lot of initials after your name. I do. And many people may not understand what they stand for. Now I understand, you know, most people get RN as registered nurse, but what is the BSN?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

BSN is a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. And CMT, a CMP is a certified massage therapist.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Oh, nice. That's amazing. I would have loved if I'd had a nurse during my whole ordeal. They could have done that because spending so much time laying on your back in bed, you can get so sore.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I became interested in massage therapy when my first husband died when he was 48.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Oh wow, that's young.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Yeah, he had melanoma. And uh we went through a lot with him, and it was a very, very difficult time for I and for my my two sons. So I became very interested in alternative healing modalities.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Is that where the Reiki master came in?

SPEAKER_00 12:55

It is, yes. Yep, that's it. So he he died before I was able to really administer to him energetically. That was the start of my interest in this because I knew that our Western medicine was failing him. There was nothing offered to him to to help him. He just um he just passed away. So I became very, very interested in uh why did he die like this? Why why did this happen? And um the more I learned, the more insatiable I was about learning about this. I was a very, very good and smart nurse. I knew my stuff, but I didn't know my stuff about all these other modalities. And and it was so important because Western medicine lacks in in offering patients these different types of modalities. Now, in eastern medicine, this is what they rely on. They rely on acupuncture, chiropractic, and energy work. And so that's what I wanted to learn, and so I did.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Well, you know, even here in Germany, they offer acupuncture. And whenever you go in, I was so shocked. The first time that I went to go see a general practitioner here, I had the flu. And when I went in there, she goes, Okay, I'm going to prescribe for you a week in bed, chicken soup, and just plenty of fluids. That's how she treated it. There was like no medicine that was not going to be doing any good anyway. She wasn't trying to push any kind of prescriptions on me. Rest, chicken soup, fluids. That was what she prescribed. Isn't that interesting? And I'm like, okay, really? Like, I'm so shocked. And it's been incredible. It's like having headaches here. They're like, have you tried acupuncture? Have you tried chiropractic? It's it's much more a part of the system here than I have ever encountered in the United States. When I was going through all of my surgeries, nobody ever mentioned nutrition. And that ended up being the saving grace for me. Changing my nutrition, my diet got rid of about 90% of my pain.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Sure. Following the natural processes and just letting the body heal itself, which it's designed to do. I guess a part of that process here in the in in Western medicine, which I was totally involved in in the beginning, is it's just it's a very complicated and multi-layered system. It's a process of maturation, just from a nursing perspective. Nurses are considered kind of the low man on the totem pole when it comes to having a say in how someone is treated. And the more that you learn, like in nutrition or in energy work or Reiki or anything like that, the more that you learn, the more the physicians will get their backup. But some of them now, the younger ones, are able to appreciate it much more now. But when I first started, this was like 25 years ago. This was a long time ago when my first husband died. And I was just starting to get comfortable in my own skin about my nursing career. And when I first started in nursing, I was this little Pollyanna that would never say no to anybody. And I was intimidated by all the physicians. But as I grew comfortable with my own skills, that kind of fell to the wayside. I was very comfortable doing my own thing, and then patients enjoyed what I was doing and didn't make a big splash about here. I was working in the ICU and I was having my ICU patient soak their feet. I I had I got some Epsom salts and I had them soaking their feet. And the physicians would look at me and I just said, Hey, how are you? I didn't tell people what I was doing. I just went ahead and did it, which just raised a bunch of eyebrows, actually. And finally, they started to ask me what I was doing. And I so I told them I was doing some energy work on these people. And Nurses Day is May 12th every year. That's Florence Nightingale's birthday.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

And I was working at a very large health center in Boston, and I just might doing my own thing and I'm in the ICU. And the director of nurses came to me and she said, Miriam, we were wondering if you would speak at our Nurses' Day celebration. And I said, I would be thrilled. I said, sure, I'd love to. And I said, So what do you want me to talk about? And she said, energy work. We want you to tell us about that. Well, I was thrilled. I was so excited that they had asked me to do that because some individuals would come up to me and ask me what I was doing. But most would just kind of skirt away from it. Actually, some of the physicians would come up like privately. They didn't want anybody to know that they were talking to me about it, but they did. And then finally at the Nurses' Day thing, there was like a couple hundred people there, including some physicians. Yeah, it was really awesome. And I I had written a course about healing beyond the physical, which was just an outline of other healing modalities that are available to people. They're not covered by insurance because the Western medicine modality does not recognize this stuff yet. They still don't. Although some insurances are are starting to pay for Reiki and they're starting to pay for a few other things, acupuncture and chiropractic. But the basic energy work, no, they're not they'll if it's included in the nursing care people get, then yes. But anyway, it people are becoming much more curious about it and they're willing to try it and see if it helps them because they have a lot of ailments that are not responding to Western medicine treatments. You know, so for people who say who have chronic back pain, for them to go and have one massage, they will be walking on clouds when they come out of there because for the first time in a very long time, their pain is gone.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Oh, I'm a big believer in massage therapy because after I had my accident, I have a couple of damaged discs in my lower back and I started having sciatic problems. I mean, as if it was in my 30s, it was having sciatica. I would be walking across a room and my leg would start dragging because I couldn't pick it up. And my doctor was like, Yeah, you're gonna need surgery. And I'm like, no, I've had enough surgeries, I'll find something else. And I started going to get massages uh like every week for a month with them really focusing on the sciatic area. And then I went to like every other week and then maybe like once a month, and it completely went away. Good for you. It is still gone. I haven't gotten massages in a long time since we've been living in Europe, but because I went and did that, it corrected the problem with massage, and I never had to have a back surgery.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Yeah. Oh, good for you. That was wonderful. Well, massage moves energy. When people have pain, that's evidence that their energy is blocked and they need to have it moved somehow or other, either by massage or by acupuncture or by chiropractic, or there are many other methodologies that they can use. But Western medicine, they're slowly coming around. But I would try to incorporate that into my basic Western medicine nursing training. People have become much more knowledgeable about the like the benefits of massage. And so that there was a study done, and this this was quite a while, it was like nine or ten years ago. Medicare did this study to find out that people have spent out-of-pocket money up to like $30 billion to pay for these massage treatments and Reiki and all these other things. $30 billion with a B dollars. And so the insurance companies are very interested in all of this stuff, but they have not embraced it yet. Anyway, so I became very interested in it, and I wanted to include that in my stories because it took a while for me to have the courage to incorporate it because I didn't I didn't have the courage to just do it in the hospital setting.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

So what was it that changed your behavior? What gave you the courage to go forward with this?

SPEAKER_00 21:15

After my husband died, I I didn't really care to be honest. I I just said this lady needs to have her hip massaged. She's having pain in her hip. So I just went ahead and did it. Yeah. And I had wonderful outcomes. So I included it in the care that I gave. For a long time, I had two parallel healing modalities going on. My my Western medicine nursing process that I was using, and then the alternative stuff that I was using. But then I just decided I needed to combine them both. So that's what I did. But I did not get into any trouble. I there was um one woman that they were an elderly couple, and her husband had a huge abdominal surgery. He had a tube in his nose that went into To his stomach, a nasogastro tube. And he hated it. He wanted it out. But they couldn't remove it until his bowels started to wake up again after this surgery. And he just was not making any progress with that. So his wife was just desperate to do something to help. So I said to her, Are you open to trying something different? And she said, Um, oh yes. So I taught her how to encourage the chakras. I don't know if you're familiar with the chakras. We have seven major chakras in our body and multiple minor chakras, but his major chakra was very much damaged by this surgery. So it needed to be encouraged to repair and to start working again. So I showed her how to just make circles over his abdomen, clockwise circles with her hand. She didn't have to touch them, just make these circles. And I showed her how to do it. And I said, just do it as often as you can, and that's going to wake up this these energy centers. So she did. And that afternoon, he didn't take much encouragement, but that afternoon it all started to work again. Oh, anyway, it's uh it's a process of combining them both.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Now, before you decided to do this book, had you ever done any writing before?

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Never. Well, I've always written poems. I find that an easy way to express emotion, and I do keep journals. I've kept journals since I was a kid. But I never really tackled a book until I had all of these, I guess they're like little essays. Some of them are maybe two pages long, some of them are 15 pages long, these stories. And I had quite a few of them. And I said, Well, I'm gonna try and put these into a book, but I had absolutely no idea how to do it. So I went to this conference last summer. First, I joined the Cape Cod Writers Group. I said, Well, maybe they'll help me figure out how to do this, and they certainly did. The writers group puts on monthly Writers' Nights Out, and they are just wonderful. I've learned so much from them. And these four people that I've become friends with, I meet them at the Writers Night Out, and we have a lot of fun. It's kind of a social time, but they always have a speaker who speaks on a certain topic. And like the last time I went to one that it was all about marketing, marketing your book. I know nothing about marketing. So I went and I again I learned so much. And I got uh resources that if I had questions, I could call this person or that person, and it was wonderful. So I think that's what helped me the most was to join this writer's group.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Whenever you started writing this, what kind of a process did you go through? I mean, did you sit down and plot the whole thing out, or did you just start writing down stories?

SPEAKER_00 24:42

I decided to take a creative writing class. So I went to University of Maine in Machayas and I took this creative writing class, and my professor was Tessa Mellis. She was absolutely wonderful. She was brutal. She would say to me, Mary, that's just awful. Just cut that whole section out. And I I was devastated. What? It took me two weeks to write that. But I learned so much, and I was afraid all my classmates were all like 18, 19 years old. And here I am, you know, I was in my 60s probably, and I thought that I would be the the outcast in the group. And to the contrary, I I just made so many friends up there, and um, it was really fun. So I took creative writing for four semesters. I always thought I was very good at English and grammar and all that stuff, but I wasn't. But I really learned a lot, and I learned to let my imagination lead some of the way because I was very black and white and it just didn't read well.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Well, even when you're writing a memoir, it still has to be colorful, it has to be entertaining. Exactly. Yeah. Even when you're dealing with facts, you still have to put imagery into it.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

So that people can fall into the stories with you. Exactly right. Do you have a publication date set for your book yet?

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Well, I was told that it would be in June, but I'm thinking it's more going to be like in July, because it's already gone to the proofreader. It's already in print, and he's formatted it. And I've seen it for the very last time till it comes out in proof, according to Diane, my editor. And we have the front cover done and the back cover done. Should be soon.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

And you do have your website, marypfisher.com, where it has the links and everything that when it does become available, people can find it on there and go to a buy page to pick it up.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Yes, my dear niece built my web page. I don't know how to use it yet.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

She did a good job. She did a great job on it.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Yeah, it's beautiful. I'm so proud of her. She's an artist. She's gonna teach me how to how to use my own website.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

So now, this is the point of the show that we like to do five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but we're just gonna keep going with it anyway. Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. Question one What is the favorite genre that you go to when you want to read a book to relax?

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Um, probably a cozy mystery.

SPEAKER_01 27:24

I agree with you there. I love cozy mysteries. Do you have a favorite author in that?

SPEAKER_00 27:27

In a cozy mystery? I do. Her name is just give me a second, Judy Lee. Judy, I have not read any of hers. Judy Lee. Judy, I'm 75 years old. And Judy is in her 70s, and she wrote a book called The Five French Hens. I don't think I have ever laughed so hard. I started laughing, I think, at page two, and I never stopped. I actually wrote her an email. I found her email address from her website, and so she and I have corresponded a few times. It's Lee is L-E-I-G-H. I just loved her, and the five French hens are all women that are in their 70s, and they met at Water Aerobics. Oh, nice. And there's five plots going on at the same time, and you come to love these characters. Question two.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Since you have worked in such a high stress career working in critical care and as an ICU nurse, what is your favorite self-care activity when you need to just de-stress?

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Oh, well, the answer to that is music. I love to sing, I love to play the piano, I do them both together, I love to listen to music, and I can just fly away with my eyes closed and my headset on. I would say that's my answer.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Question three. What is one happy, memorable, patient moment that comes to mind when you think of your career?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Popped in my head and it's in the book. Not too long after my husband died. I was very depressed, grieving. And um the way I deal with stuff like that is to throw myself into work. I would work morning, noon, and night if they needed me to. So I went into work and and we had an extra patient in the ICU. So I took him. I so I had three patients, most everybody else had two. And this man looked just like my father. And my father used to sing all the time. He had a beautiful Irish tenor voice, but the man just looked so much like him. I was like flabbergasted when I saw him. So I went in to check him out, and um, when I was helping him get cleaned up because we didn't have an aid to do that, and he had had a stroke, and so did my father. And both he and my father had this very exaggerated way of talking. But my father could still sing. He sang beautifully, even with the remnants of his stroke. So this man said to me, You have a beautiful smile. And I was just, he just caught me by surprise by saying that. And I said, Well, well, thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And I smiled when he said that. And he said, But you don't do it often enough. And he just kind of called my bluff, you know, and I said, You know, I'm so sorry. I'm going through a lot of stuff in my life, but I shouldn't bring it into work. So you're absolutely right, and I thank you. And he started to sing to me. He started to sing, when you're smiling, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. And honest to goodness, my heart opened up. And I felt like, you know, when you have a big giggle that's coming up, you just want to laugh out loud and and giggle, and that's what happened to me. My heart opened up. It was like my father singing to me. So I started singing with him. When you're smiling, when you're smiling, and I started to dance around his bed, and it was just the funniest, most wonderful moment. And then when we were done with the song, he started to clap and he he pointed to the doorway of his room. The whole staff was there. The physicians were there, the staff was there, they all started clapping, and so we sang again. It was just the most wonderful moment because of that man. I was able to open up this sad heart that I had, and just just all this joy came out because it was like my father was right there again with me, and it was just wonderful. So that story's in the book.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

That's a fantastic story.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Question four Do you have any hidden talents that you don't showcase for others?

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Um, probably my music. I have a really nice voice, and I used to sing when I was younger, but and I oftentimes thought that I would go into singing professionally, but I never did. And so I I don't sing very often. I sing for my husband and my my family sometimes, but I'm a mediocre piano player, but I'm a really good singer. So I guess that's my hidden talent.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Question five. What is one thing on your bucket list that you are determined to tick off within the next year?

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Oh dear. My bucket list is um it was quite long, but I've kind of checked a few things off. What I want to do, are you sitting down? Yeah. I want to go to the Amazon. Oh. I told you I was on this quest to learn energy medicine. And I have taken many, many courses with my dear friend Sandra. We went to a school called the Four Wind Society, and one of my teachers there, her name was Linda Fitch. And Linda is a shaman. And so Linda takes small groups of people to Peru yearly, and she goes usually in May, that she goes to the Amazon. And that is something that I want to do with Linda next May. That's my plan.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

That would be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yeah. She takes maybe five or six people, and they study with the Peruvian shamans, and they just have an amazing experience. We live in tents, but they're supposed to be like lamping, not really.

unknown 33:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Because I I would not like to be in a tent on the floor of the Amazonian jungle. Yeah. But she said the tents are beautiful. So that's one of my goals. Another goal is I want to see the northern lights.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

I want to see them in person, not just beautiful pictures of them. I really want to see them in person. I'd like to go to Iceland to do that.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

This has been absolutely fabulous. Thank you so much for joining me today. Let's go ahead and tell everybody again who you are and what is the book that you have written.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

My name is Mary Paula Fisher. I've been a nurse forever, a registered nurse. I am a massage therapist. And I also do Reiki. Um, I'm a Reiki master. And I do energy healing. The name of my book is The Other Side of Nursing, Lessons I've Learned from My Patients. And I guess that's it. And it should be coming out. Well, they told me June, but it might be July.

SPEAKER_01 34:11

And luckily, by the time that this actually airs, we will have the publication date. I hope so. So the listeners just need to check the description of today's podcast to find all of your access information so that they can find your website and the link to buy your book when it is available. Thank you so much, Diane. This was fun. So there you have it, folks. My interview with the amazing Mary P. Fisher. She has lived an incredible life, and this book promises to be just as fascinating. And the good news is her book was published on August 1st, 2024. So you can run over to Amazon.com right now and get your copy. Be sure to check the link in the description of today's podcast, and you can jump right over there and get your copy without any delay. And now, as I promised, we have some great announcements coming up. First of all, I am working very hard on bringing all of the magazines that we have in publication so far into print versions that you will also be able to get on Amazon.com or the Amazon in whatever country you're in. Now, I hope to have actual publication dates ready for those. Our plan is to put them up on pre-sale as soon as I get them all ready and to have all of them drop together on October 31st as our treat to you. No tricks, we promise. Another great thing that has happened, I have enlisted my husband, Pedro Burkhart, who happens to be an IT executive. He is an information technology architect who is very well versed in SAP and so many other fields. I mean, it's incredible the things that he knows about information technology. But I have hired him as an IT expert for BookBanter magazine. And we are going to be going this year to the Frankfurt Book Mesa in Frankfurt, Germany for the largest publishing book fair in the world. This event is absolutely fabulous. Look in the description of today's podcast, and we will have a link to the Frankfurt Book Mesa's website so you can check it out for yourself. Even if you can't get to Germany, they have online events that you can check out on YouTube and just on their website, and you can still participate virtually for a lot of the things going on at this incredible book fair. There are companies from all around the world who are in publishing that come together every year in October for the Frankfurt Book Mesa. And if you are wanting to be a part of the publishing industry, this is a place for you to check out. Trust me on this. And we are going to be doing some fantastic articles about this for the last issue of BookBanter magazine for 2024. And we're hoping to get some live interviews while we're at the book fair that we will play during a holiday hiatus between the middle of December and the first of February when we come back for season four of Book Banter with Diane Burkhardt. So, as I told you, there are so many incredible things going on right now. This is going to be such a great holiday season. Please stick around and check out all of the magazines we've got coming up. We've got our next issue that's dropping on October 1st. And then we also have the December issue, which is going to drop a little bit early for Black Friday shopping in November, because it's also going to be not just our December issue, but also our year-end book buying guide that you will want whenever you're ready to go do your holiday shopping, whenever you want to buy books for yourself or as a gift for someone else. It will feature every author who has been on BookBanter this season and so much more. So keep checking out our website, Burkhartbooks.com, and of course our magazine, Bookbanter Magazine, that you can also find on our website. I think that's enough for today, folks. Oh my gosh, I've got so much stuff to do. I still have some more episodes to edit. I've got magazines to finish. I've got to prepare for the book mesa. So I guess I'd better get ready. So now you know what time it is, folks. It's time for you all to go forth and be really happy about all the cool stuff that's coming up.