What Would It Take to Make You Appreciate the Precious Moments of Your Life?

Illustration by McClain Moore for AJN.

Imagination vs. reality.

Who hasn’t thought about it from time to time, the sudden grim diagnosis, the force of the realization that all that time you thought you had to live, love, learn, explore, and change may really be finite after all? Who hasn’t wondered what you would do with the remaining time if that happened—and by corollary, what you should be doing differently now?

But that’s all in the mind and imagination. The real clarifying shock of such an experience remains out of reach for most of us—until it happens.

Collecting experiences ‘like Mario connecting coins.’

This month’s Reflections essay, “The Last One,” is by Fran Wiedenhoeft, a former nurse anesthetist in the military. In it, she describes her own reaction after she found herself, at a relatively young age, facing just such a diagnosis.

In the two weeks before the surgery . . . I threw myself with frantic determination into collecting lasts: last long run . . . , last trip to the zoo, last potato peeled, last kiss, last caress. . . . Rather than enjoying each precious moment and every last experience, I was rushing through […]

2019-10-04T11:29:52-04:00October 4th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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Dark Water, Wild Winds: Notes of a Flight Nurse

I must see new things
And investigate them.
I want to taste dark water
And see crackling trees and wild winds.
—Egon Schiele

IMG_2650Repatriation

I’m standing on the tarmac in Manaus, Brazil, where there is indeed a wild wind; it blows debris across the runway yet does nothing to stave off the nearly intolerable heat. Sweat soaks my back and drips down the center of my chest. My limbs are heavy with lethargy. The heat index is 110 but it feels much hotter—even the Learjet fails to provide a haven from the equatorial sun.

We’d come to Brazil to repatriate an Englishman who’d been visiting family and was struck down by sudden and severe seizures. He’d spent weeks in the hospital, sustaining scans and diagnostics to pinpoint the cause, and endured the addition of one antiepileptic medication after another.

While the seizures finally ceased, he was left disquieted and uncomfortable, unsure which symptoms were due to the 7 cm brain mass that had been discovered and which were side effects of the myriad of antidotes. By the time we were dispatched for this mission, he was medically stable and ready to go home to deal with the ominous findings. Biopsies awaited and treatments would be […]

2016-11-21T13:01:03-05:00July 27th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing stories, patient experience|0 Comments
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Tilting the Earth

Elizabeth R. Plumer, PhD, JD, is a biochemist and intellectual property attorney. She lives in Saco, ME.

When an MRI revealed that my four-year-old daughter’s brain cancer had returned, I took the only action possible: I bought a dog. I scoured the Sunday papers and found just the puppy I was looking for, a Rottweiler. No deep psychological analysis was necessary to decipher my choice. I wanted a dog to protect my daughter from external threats, even if it could not protect her from the one threat that mattered most.

We named our puppy, Maggie, after Rod Stewart’s Maggie May, because from the moment she entered our lives, she stole our hearts. Maggie whimpered through that first night until I fell asleep on the couch with her gently snoring on my chest.

It was like having a newborn in the house again, and just as I had filled photo albums of my daughters, I took pictures of Maggie and my girls together. In one, taken the first summer we had her, Maggie lies in the shade beneath the swing set as if on sentry duty for my four-year-old and her seven-year-old sister. My girls hold steady on their swings and smile into the camera. The younger one wears one of my husband’s T-shirts over her bathing suit and sports a pixie haircut, the […]

2016-11-21T13:10:51-05:00January 30th, 2012|patient engagement, patient experience|6 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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