Nurses Aren’t Just Healers, They’re Teachers Too: A Patient’s View

Illustration by Jennifer Rodgers. All rights reserved. Illustration by Jennifer Rodgers. All rights reserved.

A teeny red bump had mysteriously appeared on my left index finger. It hurt when I pressed on it. I figured it was nothing. . . .

That’s the start of the June Reflections essay in AJN, “Ms. Lisa and Ms. MRSA,” a patient experience narrative by freelance writer Shannon Harris. As luck would have it, the bump on her finger, it turns out, is not nothing. It’s MRSA.

The diagnosis takes a while. Finally the situation worsens, and surgery is needed. The author takes it all in stride, at least in retrospect:

The third physician stood out to me most. He asked to take a picture of my green and black, staph-infected finger with his iPhone. “Sure. Look at it! I thought this only happened to pirates,” I told him as he snapped away. He glanced at the young, button-nosed nurse standing beside him. “Don’t you want a picture? For your records?” he asked.

She shook her head, squinting and gritting her teeth. “I know. Yuck,” I said. I later shared photos of my infection journey online, to the great wonder and disgust of my friends and family. Before that, though, came surgery.

The author’s tone is light, but the […]

2016-11-21T13:02:27-05:00June 3rd, 2015|Nursing, patient engagement, patient experience, Patients|1 Comment
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A Little Levity to Ease the Family Caregiver’s Burden

Illustration by Hana Cisarova for AJN/All right reserved. Illustration by Hana Cisarova for AJN/All right reserved.

According to the CDC, almost 21% of households in the U.S. are affected by family caregiving responsibilities. The pressures and costs of this unpaid labor of love have been well documented.

This month’s Reflections essay, “Swabbing Tubby,” is written from the family caregiver perspective rather than that of a nurse. It’s about the wife and two adult daughters of an ailing older man as they are coached in one of the skills they will need to care for him at home.

It’s a tough situation, but one in this case leavened by the ability of these three women to laugh a little at the more absurd aspects of their predicament. Here’s the beginning:

In retrospect, I can’t help feeling sorry for the earnest young woman who tried so hard to show my mother, my sister, and myself how to hook up our brand-new, at-home, IV feeding device. She was all of 25, with the freshly scrubbed look of a young schoolgirl. Her youthful perkiness was no match for the trio of exhausted, crabby women who faced her across the empty hospital bed. Dad was down in X-ray having yet another CT scan, and the three of us were […]

2016-11-21T13:03:06-05:00February 2nd, 2015|patient engagement, patient experience, Patients|1 Comment
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Nurse Blog Notes: Generation Gaps, Hypothermia, Informatics, Nurses Writing

By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor

via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s skip the latest research findings, policy disputes, the unpleasant wait for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of health care reform. Here’s what we’re finding on the nursing blogs these days, a sample of recent posts you might find of interest:

The Nerdy Nurse offers “7 Tips to Be a Successful Clinical Informatics Nurse.” The post isn’t terribly technical; instead, it’s for nurses who might be thinking of going into this line of nursing, and to that end it highlights some strengths to emphasize in an interview.

At madness: tales of an emergency room nurse, a recent post called “There’s a Human Being Under There” sketches out a bit of what’s involved in inducing “therapeutic hypothermia” (for more detail, preview the July AJN CE “Therapeutic Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest”), but then steps back far enough to remember that all of these processes involve an actual person.

Those Emergency Blues takes an undogmatic look at so-called “generation gaps” among nurses. Instead of throwing stones, dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ this post takes a more sensible, fair-minded, probing approach:

Ultimately what I am trying to get at is while I am sure generation gaps exist on units, I do not believe it is entirely as a result of degree vs diploma more than it might be just personality related. Differing maturity levels, different interests, and people at different […]

2016-11-21T13:09:52-05:00June 19th, 2012|Nursing|5 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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