When writing The Paramedic’s Angel and, to some extent, Extreme Medical Services before it, I always knew I wanted a strong character to represent nurses in the books. I also wanted to have the nurse be some sort of Unusual, a creature of myth or legend. The question was what kind of Unusual should she be.
As a nurse myself, I am hyper-aware of how nurses are represented in mainstream media. Often the nurses are peripheral characters to doctors in a storyline. If a nurse is the main character, he or she is represented as a caricature of nursing, projecting nurses as deeply flawed or as people who couldn’t cut it in medical school. I wanted the primary nursing character in the Extreme Medical Services series to be a strong, stand-alone character who represented the true themes and history of nursing.
Then it hit me, and I created the Unusuals called the Eldara. While the Eldara are a creation of mine, they are representative of the divine messengers who are present in all myths and cultures. The Eldara are the messengers and representatives of the gods on earth, they are the angels, the valkyries, and the kitsune seen in many cultures. Sometimes they are warriors, sometimes messengers, and sometimes change agents. Ashley Moore is an Eldara Sister, a small group of these divine messengers who are healers travelling the earth to help humans take care of each other. In other words, she’s both an Angel and a Nurse in every sense of the word.
You can read more about Ashley in all of the Extreme Medical Services books, from the prequel The Vampire and the Paramedic, to the first book Extreme Medical Services. She really shines and comes into her own in The Paramedic’s Angel where she becomes paramedic Dean Flynn’s companion and guide through the adventure in which he has found himself. Check out the links below to find all the books and learn more about Ashley Moore for yourself!
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