‘You Could Do This’: Heeding A Late Call to a Nursing Career

The daunting challenge of family caregiving.

Illustration by Eric Collins / ecol-art.com

“When I meet with families for the first time, I always remember the helplessness I felt as a new caregiver,” writes Linda Beall, the author of “A Clear Small Voice,” the Reflections essay in the September issue of AJN.

Beall, now a hospice nurse, is referring to the confusion she felt while caring for her mother during the week after her initial hospitalization with metastatic cancer:

I recall helping her into the car at the time of her discharge. She had difficulty taking even a few steps. Huge staples laddered down the front of her body from sternum to pelvis. She had a drain to be emptied. I had a handful of prescriptions that I took to the pharmacy, not really knowing what the meds were.

Beall was not yet a nurse at that point. In fact, she didn’t graduate from nursing school until age 47. What spurred her to consider beginning a nursing career far later in life than most?

A clear small voice, easily missed.

In this engaging essay, she describes the experience of caring for her dying mother, and how, in the […]

2019-09-16T07:46:02-04:00September 16th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments

Vampire Nurses, PhDs, Your Best Moment as a Nurse: Today’s Notes from the Nursosphere

Here are some recent posts of interest we noticed on the nursing blogs. Many of these blogs can actually be found on our blogroll, so we hope you’re exploring what’s there from time to time, even if we know the list isn’t exhaustive and is probably missing some other excellent (and at least somewhat frequently updated) blogs.

It’s good to know that Will, the nurse/comic artist who shares his drawings at Drawing on Experience, has started posting again more regularly. One of his most recent efforts depicts a night shift nurse as a kind of vampire. It’s funny and, in a way, insightful. We give just a thumbnail version of it below on the right, in the interests of preserving the artist’s copyright; to see it enlarged, click the image and visit the version posted on his site, where you can also find a bunch more drawings, many about his life as a relatively new nurse. 

The INQRI Blog (that INQRI stands for Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a real mouthful) has a new post about an increase in enrollment in nursing doctorate programs. Here’s an excerpt:

According to new data released recently by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), enrollment in doctoral nursing programs increased significantly in 2010. The AACN believes that this shows a strong interest in both research-focused and practice-focused doctorates.

The post also connects […]

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