Happy Holidays from AJN
Nursing Voices: The 10 Most-Read AJN Blog Posts of 2016
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As the editor of this blog, I’m often amazed by the originality, honesty, and quality of the writing that comes to us from people who are, in many cases, not writers by trade. AJN Off the Charts publishes articles about professional issues, health policy and research, and clinical topics, as well as many nurse and patient stories. Here are ten popular posts from 2016 that you might have missed. Some of the authors of the posts listed here are regular contributors, some are AJN editors, some are first-time contributors; some are established scholars, some are new to the nursing profession.
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The 10 most-read posts we published in 2016.*
What a Nurse Really Wants
“I just want some support. I just want to take care of my patients, and maybe get a lunch break on any given day. I just want to be heard.”
CDC Opioid-Prescribing Guideline for Chronic Pain: Concerns and Contexts
“These new guidelines cast a very wide net. Many patients with chronic pain will find themselves facing […]
Dialysis Patients’ Very Different Life or Death Choices
Illustration by Barbara Hranilovich. All rights reserved.
This month’s Reflections essay is called “Sitting with Death.” The subtitle provides a little context: A social worker on a dialysis unit bears witness to patients’ life or death choices. Despite the sad stories the author tells, this remembrance doesn’t leave a reader feeling disheartened.
Retired social worker Linda Converse writes that starting work at a dialysis center was at first daunting. How could she talk to patients about such an ultimate choice as whether or not to give up dialysis?
But over time she began to understand that there was usually no right answer. For each person, there was a different personal algorithm that guided the choice, one based on such factors as quality of life, obligations to loved ones, values, and much else. Writes Converse:
I’ll never forget some of the patients who chose to stop dialysis, nor will I forget those who chose to hold on for as long as possible. There was no consistent logic when it came to an individual’s choice. What one person considered an impossible quality of life, another wouldn’t.
Behind the Curtain: A Patient’s Evolving Relationship to Illness
Illustration by Eric Collins/ecol-arts.com. All rights reserved.
Having edited it, I’d like to recommend AJN‘s November Reflections essay, “Behind the Curtain.” In it, author Leigh Pate looks back to an early experience in her own cancer treatment. Sitting in a chemotherapy bay receiving an infusion, she overhears a conversation between a cancer patient and his nurse that she will remember years later.
The central insight of this essay can’t be put into a few words, but it has something to do with the fact that the way we think and feel about an illness changes over time as we ourselves change.
The metaphors we use to talk about an illness change as the years pass. We develop a relationship to the illness that isn’t as simple as it seemed at first. Is it really always a battle? Are there always clear winners and losers? What do we really want? What is it to be strong? […]
Information for Nurses on Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED)
The New York Times recently published an article by Paula Span called “The VSED Exit: A Way to Speed Up Dying, Without Asking Permission.” VSED stands for voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, an end-of-life option that is, on the surface, as simple as its name suggests. Span, who recently attended the first conference devoted to VSED, gives an overview of one mother’s choice to end her life using this method. She also does an excellent job enumerating the ethical, practical, and legal implications of choosing to stop eating and drinking.
Which types of patients is such a choice appropriate for? How much suffering does it involve? Are there legal pitfalls of involvement in the VSED process by nurses and physicians? We can expect that all of these questions and more will be receiving growing attention in the coming years.
Late in the article, Span quotes Judith Schwarz, PhD, RN, now clinical coordinator of End of Life Choices New York. In 2009, AJN published a CE article, “Stopping Eating and Drinking,” by Schwarz. This substantive article centers around a detailed case study. “Gertrude,” we learn, has lived a very full life. All the things that give her pleasure and a modicum of freedom are gradually being […]