09/10/2026
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What nurses saw, and were told never to say...
A woman who spoke no English was wheeled into theatre to have a small lump removed. It was the kind of lump we had seen octogenarians live with for twenty or thirty years, dying with it rather than from it. A few minutes into the operation the surgeon decided to take the whole breast and every lymph node with it.
The lump went into the incineration bin before pathology ever saw it. When she came out of the anaesthetic she lifted her hand, laid it over the place where her breast had been, and wailed. None of us could speak her language. She was wheeled into recovery and left there alone without an interpreter, because her crying 'upset' the staff, so I sat with her and held her hand until the orderly came.
I have carried that woman with me for most of my adult life, and she is only one of hundreds of people in Healing by Means of Assault. The book took decades to write. It was gathered from nurses, ex-nurses, doctors, pharmacists, ambulance officers and allied health professionals who watched the same things happen year after year until they could no longer stay.
Their accounts are woven into the voice of a single nurse on purpose, because too many of those who tried to speak under their own names were publicly disgraced, dragged through the courts, or worse. Names, places and dates have been withheld. Not one Australian publisher would touch it, and only my publisher knows who I am. You will never see me on a talk show or at a book signing, and these stories will not be told anywhere else.
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A surgeon opens a patient for an appendicectomy and finds a perfectly healthy appendix. When a young scrub nurse points this out, he shrugs: "Oh well, may as well take it out now that we are here. It has no purpose anyway."
A 31-year-old mother of three, worn down by fatigue, migraines and pain, is given a radical hysterectomy because her surgeon has decided she is a hypochondriac. He says so to the whole room while she lies unconscious on the table.
An ageing surgeon, barely able to walk with his stick, rests his scalpel over the gall bladder of a patient booked for an appendicectomy until five nurses call out at once.
An orderly lingers in the theatre doorway with a full view of a woman in stirrups, and nobody but a student nurse thinks to send him away.
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A visitor walks into a city intensive care unit late at night and finds a single student nurse, close to tears, responsible for eleven comatose patients while everyone else is on meal break.
A toddler with a polystyrene bead in her ear waits six hours in emergency, and after numerous attempts to remove without the necessary skill, is sent home with the bead pushed deeper, and ends up with a surgically perforated eardrum after a round of lost referrals and blame placed on her mother for the six week delay.
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The chapter on Indigenous health and remote area nursing is the heart of this book, and it is the reason I finally walked away from a profession I loved. Remote area nurses were the MacGyvers of the system: we ran clinics, delivered babies, set fractures and kept whole communities alive while the flying doctor visited a few days a month, focusing on the non indigenous patients.
You will meet Daisy, a leprosy patient with a wicked sense of humour who loved frightening new nurses. You will also see the boxes on the bottom shelf of the dispensary, marked with codes instead of labels. They held unapproved drugs for one doctorโs off-the-record trials, given only to Indigenous patients behind closed doors, with no records the nurses were allowed to see. This was the extent of his involvement with indigenous patients: unwitting test subjects.
I reported him, he had me struck off - and years later he was honoured for his โexcellence in Indigenous healthโ.
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An 86-year-old man who takes no medication receives a letter summoning him to a seniorsโ check, and is led to believe his pension depends on going. The doctor tells him that at his age he must be on something to survive.
He answers, I am 86 years old, I am healthy, surviving fine, and walks out with a tray of prescriptions that leave him purple, swollen and fighting for breath within days. And the doctor simply said, "I told you that at your age you can't be healthy".
Another elderly gentleman gets out of his wheelchair and off twice-daily insulin under a natural health physicianโs care. His GP is so affronted that, by the familyโs account, he gives the man a large dose of insulin in the surgery. That same day he goes into a diabetic coma and has a major stroke.
An elderly lady is told by her doctor that she must have flu vaccines regularly or risk losing her pension. Within hours after just one, she suffers excruciating pain in her head and begins to decline cognitively. By the third she is in a nursing home unable to recognise family. The doctor denies any wrongdoing and insists the patient demanded regular flu vaccines.
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Other chapters take you into the closed world of medical research and cover ups, the business of medical schools and brainwashing, the mental health merry-go-round, the business of cancer, misogyny in medicine, homelessness and poverty, the dismissal of diet, and the mismanagement of autoimmune disease and pain.
You will meet the medical bullies who advised at handover to make a patient feel stupid for being vegetarian, and who kept taping the wound of a woman whose skin blistered at every touch of adhesive until they finally did what she had asked for in the first place.
You will also read about the day a young nurse dragged herself through every shift on prescription medication, dismissed by her doctor, and healed by a naturopath.
The book closes with what we could build instead: a round-table model of care where nurses, doctors and natural health practitioners work together, as they once did.
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Every story in these pages happened, and the same things are happening on a ward somewhere in this country while you read this post. If you have ever sat beside a hospital bed knowing something was wrong and been told we did all we could, this book will put a name to that feeling. If you are a nurse, or ever were one, you will recognise your own shifts here and finally know you were never the only one who saw it.
Remember the name: Aphra Lister Alberts; one of Australia's first whistleblowing nurses, buried legally, into obscurity. About to make a big noise.
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Subscribe to follow the series, where Iโll be sharing more of the stories behind the book.
๐ป๐ฏ๐ฌ ๐จ๐ต๐ฎ๐น๐ ๐ต๐ผ๐น๐บ๐ฌ. Researcher. Integrative practitioner. Decades inside a system I loved and could not stay silent about. The book Healing by Means of Assault is coming. Because silence has already cost too many lives.