Cleveland Clinic nurse fired after publishing 'tell-some' memoir.
Memoir's publication leads to 26-year employee's firing
Adrienne Zurub spent 26 years as a nurse in the cardiac operating room of the country's foremost cardiac hospital, the Cleveland Clinic.
When she wrote her memoir, observations about her career and her employer were bound to be a part of it, offering a rare peek behind the scenes at Cleveland's largest employer.
She self-published "Notes from the Mothership" on Jan. 8.
Two weeks later, she was fired.
"They told me I was fired be cause of the book . . . after 26 years of stellar employment," Zu rub, who has hired a lawyer, said in an interview. "The two administrators who fired me admitted to me they did not even read my book."
But they said they had seen excerpts. And that was enough.
Zurub compares the Clinic in her book to a "prison environment" where nurses, to survive, must have alliances with certain surgeons who afford them protection based on the surgeon's stature within the hierarchy.
"I have observed angry, uncontrolled behavior from so-called educated people that on the street would get them arrested, beat up or shot," Zurub writes. "But that culture was/is considered part of the culture of this environment, a culture of impunity, and thus covered up or taken care of internally or generally tolerated."
The Clinic obviously doesn't see it that way. Though she said the hospital wouldn't comment about a specific personnel matter, spokeswoman Eileen Sheil wrote in an e-mail: "A critical-care patient environment demands teamwork, trust, and strict adherence to patient confidentiality."
The Clinic is a private, nonprofit entity that is not required to release the same kind of information about its business that public corporations must provide. The Clinic's 29,000 workers don't often talk publicly about their working conditions.
See her website: http://adriennezurub.com/Welcome_Center.html
