About Hui-wen Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN

Hui-Wen (Alina) Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN, is a pediatric intensive care nurse in Southern California and blogs at http://heartofnursing.blog.

Dissonance and Harmony: Balancing Nursing and Home Life During the Holidays

Between worlds.

There is nothing quite like the holiday season in a culture obsessed with happiness at all costs to make me feel the complexity of navigating back and forth between work and home life as a pediatric ICU nurse.

Home life as a mother to two young children, wife, friend, and community citizen takes on an intense pace from just before Thanksgiving through the new year. I am coordinating celebrations with family and friends, keeping tabs on the kids’ school holiday programs, addressing Christmas cards, and deftly dodging BOGO promotional emails day and night. Life feels boundless with possibilities for activity and opportunity.

I arrive at work and enter the room of my patient, whose life has been brought to a screeching halt. She lies sedated, restrained by lines and tubes, barely oriented to day versus night. If not for the holiday decorations that we put up around the unit, there may be no indication of what season it is.

What is cheerful for me to anticipate at home during the holidays may be potentially disheartening for my patients and their families to consider. I can leave the hospital at will. They cannot. I am sensitive to this fact, and my demeanor when I talk about the holidays at work […]

2019-12-12T10:47:01-05:00December 11th, 2019|Nursing, nursing perspective, wellness|0 Comments
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Amidst Nursing’s Daily Challenges, a Longing for Enduring Meaning

Early ideals, current reality.

I recently co-facilitated a breakout session at a national nursing conference in which we had the participants reflect upon life experiences that sparked their initial desire to go into nursing.

Some knew from a very early age that they were drawn to providing care for others. Others, like myself, were second-career nurses who had spent time in other professions before making our way into nursing.

We spent time talking about our early idealism about the profession and the various experiences or issues that have challenged our ideals over time. I was struck by the deep and broad range of emotions in the room: pride, frustration, hope, discouragement, cynicism, and longing.

‘An almost palpable ache.’

It is the longing that stood out to me the most.

The nurses I met in that room, and nurses I meet everywhere, certainly express longing for better staffing, improved systems that facilitate smoother workflow, and a supportive work environment. But these are all longings that tie into one deeper longing, which is a longing for enduring meaning in our day-to-day work—as hard as some days may be—and a broader […]

2019-05-06T09:17:18-04:00May 6th, 2019|Nursing, nursing career, nursing perspective, writing|1 Comment
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What’s a Preceptor’s Duty When a New Nurse Doesn’t Fit the Unit?

Challenges and joys.

square peg, round hole

Precepting new graduate nurses is challenging but also exhilarating. To guide a new nurse to a point of safe, confident, independent patient care requires a different level of critical thinking and relational skills. How do I delegate tasks and responsibility to my preceptee safely? How do I teach in a way that connects well with my preceptee’s learning style? How do I reassure the patient and family that they are safe in the care of these new hands under my watch?

Despite the challenges, it is inspiring to play an integral role in someone’s growth. I experience pride and joy watching my preceptees evolve from nervous trainees to skilled and compassionate novice nurses.

While I am always seeking to build up the new graduate nurse I’m precepting, the ultimate goal is always patient safety. There are rare times when new nurses have not not found the ‘right fit’ in our unit. We are a pediatric ICU unit in a level one trauma hospital. We care for very sick patients, are very fast-paced, and rarely have lulls in our census.

When a preceptee struggles.

I recently had a preceptee who struggled with the basics in caring for even our most stable patients. […]

2019-01-09T12:17:49-05:00January 9th, 2019|Nursing|4 Comments
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Reexamining Resilience

Words matter.

As I have been presenting at various nursing gatherings and conferences about the topic of resilience in light of work-related grief, I have been struck anew by the definitions of resilience that I find in the literature.

  • The ability to return to a state of normalcy or to “bounce back” from adversity or trauma and remain focused and optimistic about the future (Dyer & McGuinness, 1996).
  • The “ability to face adverse situations, remain focused, and continue to be optimistic for the future” (Kester & Wei, 2018).

While I understand and very much appreciate the intent (and necessity) behind these definitions, I have to ask whether we are adequately exploring the meanings of the words used within these definitions and the implications for what nurses should expect of themselves in seeking to be resilient.

Does short-term resilience look different from long-term resilience?

For example, in the definition presented by Dyer and McGuinness, a resilient nurse should be able to return to a state of normalcy. There is certainly a need for nurses to be able to maintain a steadfast mind and emotional state in the short-term moments of acute crises with their patients. A nurse returning to work after a difficult shift just the day before has to find […]

2018-10-23T10:04:47-04:00October 23rd, 2018|Nursing, nursing perspective, wellness|0 Comments
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How a Patient’s Family Heals a Nurse in this Era of Medicine

“This family’s brave, selfless, and clear-minded approach to their daughter’s last days showed me that it is still possible for me and my colleagues to heal in the ways we want to heal, hurt in the ways we accept we will hurt, and not harm in ways we never, ever intended to harm.”

A painful contradiction of pediatric ICU nursing.

One of the things that feels most unfair about pediatric ICU nursing is that with critically ill children, you don’t get the comfort of being able to look back and say, “At least they lived a long and happy life.” You ache that a baby, a toddler, a school-age child, a teenager was supposed to have their whole life ahead. But instead, much of their short life was marked by illness, prods and pokes, lines and tubes, sedation rather than play, a sterile environment full of strangers at all hours rather than a home full of time with friends and family.

The deep desire in both the parents as well as the health care providers to do anything possible to give them a shot at a future is in and of itself right and good. Yet the decision about how much to push both medicine, and the child as the obligatory recipient, in the fight for a future that is neither guaranteed in quantity nor quality can often be wrought with controversy and ethical distress. Clinicians do not necessarily find peace with their work just because a life was physically saved; sometimes quite […]

2018-08-01T10:47:19-04:00August 1st, 2018|Nursing|0 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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