from PRX.

This is Studio 316. I'm Kurti Anderson.

Stacey Rose is a playwright in Minnesota, St. Paul, but by day and sometimes also by night, she's a respiratory therapist.

As part of our day jobs series, Stacey told us about her two very different lines of work.

Not being able to breathe is just like having a giant hand squeeze your chest with this pressure that isn't painful, but which just suppresses slowly but surely the amount of air that's coming in and out.

I'm Stacey Rose. I am a writer for a stage screen and hopefully soon television.

I'm a respiratory therapist and I help people breathe.

The truth of how healthcare works is actually more interesting and more dramatic at times than

what you see on television.

Like it's interesting when I watch health care shows, like ER, which, by the way,

for a long, long time, I thought was the most accurate in terms of how health care actually

works in a hospital setting.

Befip, charging to 200. Everybody off.

Ample, Bethy. Just a sec. But they'll, like, have these tremendous codes and these like high pressure things and there's no respiratory therapist in the room

light a k and a hundred iv push hang a drip two milligrams a minute shoot a chest get a gas and call respiratory

no we're probably there already like we get yelled at if we're not there. Wow. Well, what? Today's for 50th birthday. I'd always had an interest in writing and I'd always been an avid reader. I was kind of the wheezy, chubby kid in school who read a lot of books.

And I journaled a lot. I didn't really take any of it too seriously until I was in my 30s,

actually. And I was divorcing at the time. And I was looking for something to kind of satisfy this urge to create and this urge to kind of alleviate some of the pain I was feeling around my divorce.

And so I decided to go back to college, which I often do when I don't know what to do with my life.

I ultimately chose theater. I got into NYU,

and very quickly, people began taking to the things I was writing. I had this kismet meeting

with Spike Lee on the street about halfway through my first year, and he became a mentor of sorts.

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