Making Sense of Loss, Finding Strength as a Nurse

Maria, day 6.

It was bright outside, the sun was shining, and as I looked at the window in Room 303, I saw the light peering through. Maria, a 78-year-old Hispanic woman, mother of three, could not move and did not see that spring had begun as she struggled to breath. She looked at me with her helpless teary eyes trying to communicate, but I could not hear the words.

I’d d been Maria’s primary nurse for five of the six days that she has been hospitalized. During that time, I had witnessed the tension and anxiety that existed within her family around her admission with Covid-19. I hoped silently that a DNR order would be initiated if her breathing worsened instead of her being placed on a ventilator. But I tried not to express my feelings to her family about this when I helped them to communicate with and see their mother using FaceTime.

Maria’s family watched as she slowly declined, and saw how she didn’t respond to treatments. Feeling hopeless and overwhelmed, I tried to schedule a time to speak to my nursing manager about how I was feeling, but she was always too busy scheduling and assisting on the floor after other staff called […]

2021-05-13T10:24:41-04:00May 13th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|0 Comments
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Isn’t It Ironic: A Nurse Reflects on Her J&J Vaccination

Irony: a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result. -dictionary.com

Vaccine, by Julianna Paradisi

On a recent Saturday afternoon I received the Johnson and Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine. The following Tuesday, its further administration was put on pause, “out of an abundance of caution,” after reports that six women between the ages of 18 and 48 developed a rare but serious form of blood clot six to 13 days after receiving the vaccine. One of the six women died.

There is nothing amusing about the irony that people seeking protection from COVID-19 may have developed a life-threatening adverse reaction from the vaccine. For health care providers, and perhaps especially for nurses, such events are heartbreaking.

Lifting the J&J pause.

On Friday, April 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA lifted the 10-day pause on the J&J vaccine, without restrictions, instead issuing a fact sheet to medical providers warning them of the potential for the extremely rare but serious blood clots.

When the pause was lifted, over 7 million people had received the vaccine, with additional confirmed cases of blood clots that had been reported […]

2021-04-26T11:16:05-04:00April 26th, 2021|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective, Public health|0 Comments
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Nurse Volunteers on the Front Lines of the Vaccination Effort

Joanne Disch, PhD, RN, FAAN, is professor ad honorem at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, Minneapolis, and Ellen Elpern, MSN, RN, is a retired advanced practice nurse, formerly at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago.

Nurse volunteers as an essential resource.

As of April 15, 2021, there have been over 31 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States and over 561,000 deaths. Sobering numbers. But there are some heartening numbers as well: 198 million vaccination shots have been administered so far, with 3 million doses now being given per day. To reach and continue to meet the current pace has required an extraordinary ramp-up of sites—and of the number of individuals administering the vaccines. An essential resource that’s emerged is the use of nurses as volunteers to help staff these sites.

For more than a year, the public has witnessed the compassion, competence, and heroism of nurses who are on the front lines of the COVID pandemic. Those of us who are nurses and not in the clinical setting watched with pride and empathy, knowing better than most what these nurses were experiencing—and wishing there were something that we could do. Stepping forward to volunteer for service in a vaccine clinic is one way to make a difference. These volunteer opportunities are as varied as the vaccination sites themselves, but in all cases the effort is being enriched by the active engagement of nurses, retired and otherwise.

Defuniak Springs, Florida

2021-04-16T09:15:42-04:00April 16th, 2021|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing career|0 Comments
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Remembering the Polio Vaccine Rollout, Addressing Concerns Today

‘A Most Welcome Spring.’

That’s the title of the editorial in the recently published April issue of AJN. And if you receive the print issue or go to our Web site, www.ajnonline.com, I think you’ll see that our cover reflects an image that harkens to the end of a hard pandemic winter of isolation and—for many families—desolation. Spring has arrived, along with a feeling of hope that the vaccines will allow the world to open again, IF we can do so with caution and are successful in vaccine campaigns.

Remembering the relief at having a polio vaccine.

I was in kindergarten when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was rolled out. I remember my mother telling me that everyone was going to be getting a new medicine and I vividly recall my entire class lining up to get the injection from the school nurse.

I remember my mother being very happy about it because a boy in the neighborhood—a friend of my brother—had had polio and now wore leg braces and used crutches. When she saw him, she would sometimes say, “too bad the vaccine came too late for John.”

Nurses’ role in addressing vaccine concerns.

2021-04-26T11:50:12-04:00April 5th, 2021|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing, patient engagement, Public health|0 Comments
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Will We Ever Know How Many Nurses and Other Health Workers Died from COVID-19?

By Unjay Markiewicz/ Unsplash

The lead article in the March issue of AJN examines the lack of accurate data on deaths from COVID-19 among nurses and other health care workers:

“More than a year after the first SARS-CoV-2 infection was identified in the United States, there is no reliable count of COVID-19 cases or deaths in nurses and other health care workers. The COVID Data Tracker maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 389,380 health care worker infections and 1,332 deaths as of February. Yet, as far back as November of last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported 1,162 staff deaths in U.S. long-term care facilities alone. Still another list, maintained by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News, has counted 3,258 health care worker deaths, 503 of them among nurses.”

So while praised and touted as “heroes,” those who died might not always have been recognized as casualties of the hazards imposed by their jobs during the pandemic. The report also notes:

“[B]ased on past epidemics and state data, health care workers would be expected to make up an estimated 5% to 15% of COVID-19 infections in the United States. With almost 20 million U.S. cases, […]

2021-03-25T10:41:28-04:00March 25th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|0 Comments
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