The Emergence of Sacred Space and Time in Hospice Care

I knew he was close. His breathing had changed, but I also knew it could be hours. It was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and I was ready to be done with my week. The apartment was full of friends and family, full of an energy that was neither nervous nor productive. It felt like the buzz of being. The man’s wife and daughter were in the bedroom with him.

In the February issue Reflections essay, “The Car Ride Home,” author Paige Fletcher movingly evokes an episode from her experience as a hospice nurse. This one-page essay, which will be free until the end of February, is written with unusual clarity and restraint and is well worth the five or 10 minutes it takes to read it.

Fletcher writes convincingly of a sense of sacred space and time that can emerge as a life ends in a supportive home hospice setting. And she describes her […]

2021-02-16T15:30:52-05:00February 12th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments

Caring for the Patient You Never Had a Chance to Get to Know

“For months, we simply knew him as this often agitated, sometimes unstable, generally nonverbal, nonpurposeful patient whose actual personhood seemed, if I’m honest, unrecoverable. We didn’t even know who we were trying to recover…”

This month’s Reflections essay in AJN is by Hui-wen Sato, a pediatric intensive care nurse in California. This piece is difficult to describe because it fits no clear category; this is also what makes it alive and engaging.

In “Beholding the Returning Light,” Sato explores the the experience of caring for a patient without ever having had a chance to get to know that person. What do you feel for that patient, and how much do you invest yourself in his or her possible future?

The ‘unthought known.’

Such questions and others may exist on a subconscious level throughout an ordinary work day for nurses in a number of settings. Sato, as she traces the sequence of events, her own emotions, and the role of the patient’s family, adroitly brings them to the surface. […]

Even in an Unimaginable Crisis, Nature Heals

“Eleven-year-old Olivia’s parents were ‘done,’ had reached their limit of bad news, and refused to enter the conference room. They didn’t want more information or what they perceived as pressure to withdraw life support.”

The hardest decision.

by Janet Hamlin for AJN

These words in the opening paragraph of this month’s Reflections column,”Little Sparrow,” describe a situation that will be instantly recognizable to many nurses, especially those who regularly work with people who have suffered severe head injuries or other central nervous system trauma. These two short sentences encapsulate the terrible crisis that develops when a tragic outcome seems inevitable to staff—while family members, in shock, struggle to absorb information and make decisions.

A healing garden.

In the essay, which will be free until February 20, Elaine Meyer, PhD, RN, describes her approach to one such family. While the parents of the seriously injured young girl pray for a miracle, staff are distressed because they feel they are inflicting unnecessary suffering on the child. […]

2019-02-05T08:19:55-05:00February 5th, 2019|family, Nursing, nursing stories|1 Comment

A Dream of Horses: An Aging Veteran’s Healing Encounter

“Let’s go for a ride,” I said to Joe as he lay expressionless on his bed, covered in blankets and staring at the ceiling. The room was stuffy with hot, stale air. No bigger than a walk-in closet, the space held the lifetime possessions, many of them scattered on the bed, floor, and windowsill, of a 75-year-old veteran residing in an assisted living facility. Joe appeared frail and bored in the silence of the room.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin for AJN.

That’s the start of the Reflections column, “A Dream of Horses,” in the January issue of AJN. Written by a nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the short, moving essay describes a series of healing encounters between a frail older man, who seems to have given up on life, and the horses at a therapeutic equestrian barn.

The here and now.

The story told here reminds us how much we humans can cocoon ourselves against the more elemental forces of the natural world, and how healing it can be to encounter a magnificent animal that asks only that we be present in the here and now. The senses awaken. We look beyond our own habitual ways of […]

Intimate Strangers: A Pediatric Intensive Care Nurse Reflects

By Lisa Dietrich for AJN.

“How do I talk about these things with a stranger unless I know how to be intimate?” asks pediatric intensive care nurse Hui-wen (Alina) Sato, the author of “Intimate Strangers,” the Reflections essay in AJN’s August issue.

Sato writes about “walking intimately . . . through the most devastating hours of her life” with a woman she’s only just met—even as her role as a nurse involves ending the life-sustaining treatments of this mother’s child.

Nurses will tell you such experiences can be common in their profession. But essays like this remind us that such experiences are also remarkable. Sato is the type of nurse who ponders her role, who stops after the fact to wonder what it means to be a participant at such moments in others’ lives. […]

Go to Top