Susan Ellison Busch

For over two decades, I worked as a nurse practitioner at the Cleveland Clinic, rounding on dialysis patients whose stories stayed with me long after my shift ended. I watched people fight for their lives three days a week, tethered to a machine and I knew those stories deserved to be told. Not in a medical journal. Not in a textbook. But in a story that could make someone feel what it's actually like to sit in that chair, or stand beside someone who does.

My debut novel, Chance at Life (2025), is set inside a dialysis unit where patients and caregivers form an unlikely, deeply human community. These are people from every walk of life different races, different social classes, different dreams thrown together by kidney failure and bound by something none of them expected: each other. The story weaves through addiction, poverty, discrimination, abuse, ethical dilemmas, and the profound question that haunts every corner of that unit: when do you keep fighting, and when do you let go? It took me ten years to write, interrupted by crises, grief, and the beautiful chaos of living a full life while trying to honour the lives of others on the page.

Before Chance at Life, I wrote Yearning for Normal, an award-winning memoir about raising my middle son, who was born with Deletion Syndrome. He has since passed, and I continue to stay involved with the Foundation, helping plan retreats for mothers navigating that same exhausting, love-filled road I once walked. That book found its way into the hands of mothers who felt completely alone in their struggle and hearing that it helped them is still the greatest thing my writing has ever done.

I have spoken at national conferences on topics related to kidney disease and chronic illness, and on the unique challenges of raising a child with a rare genetic deletion syndrome. I spent years teaching nurse practitioner students at Kent State University, shaping the next generation of clinicians who will one day sit with patients in rooms just like the ones I describe in my writing.

I live with my husband on the edge of the Valley National Park in Ohio, where the trees and the sky remind me every day why stories about living really living matter so much. When I'm not writing, you'll find me hiking those trails or on a tennis court, chasing something that moves faster than I do.

If you want to take your listeners somewhere they've never been inside the hidden world of chronic illness, cares giving, and the messy, beautiful fight for life I'd love to have that conversation with you.