What Happened to Wonder? A Nurse Looks Back
This month’s Reflections essay is by Britni Busfiield, who is an RN on the progressive care neuro/trauma unit at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In this one-page essay, she writes about an experience during her last year of nursing school in which she observed a cerebral angiogram conducted on a patient with a suspected aneurysm.
While very little happens in the essay in any dramatic sense, we felt that we should publish it because it touched on a range of experience that is easily forgotten by those who work in health care, and by everyone else as well.
Wonder: easy to forget, difficult to convey.
The best word for this type of experience might be wonder—when technology illuminates the hidden structures of a complex and often mysterious organ like the brain; when a medical team works with seamless coordination as the patient whose fate may rest in the balance lies shrouded at their center and the physician speaks to her as he threads a catheter into her brain. She writes:
The screen lit up. Bright white fluid leaked slowly into the intricate map of vessels across the display. The dye flooded in like a drop of paint in water, dancing its way through each […]