A Nurse’s Lessons from Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Burnt-out and realizing it’s time for a change.

I had always been able to juggle family, school, and work life well, including roles as class mom, scout leader, and community volunteer, completing my doctorate in nursing, and working two jobs. But at a certain point, and despite my supportive family’s efforts, I began to burn out. Working as a nurse leader for a behavioral health unit was a dream come true and a nightmare all in one. I found myself caring so much, investing so much of myself, that I lost myself in the process.

In the hope that it would help, I moved back to nursing education. It didn’t. There was a void. I was missing something. I was missing me.

Maybe this is what burnout on the way to compassion fatigue feels like. But whatever we call it, my response was to quit my job and hike the Appalachian Trail for five months from Maine to Georgia with my husband. We’d always lived simply, and once we’d made the decision to go, the pieces fell into place.

Along the way, I made many discoveries. It’s paradoxical that I’d gone hiking to forget about nursing, yet I was reminded about it with each step.

Here are some souvenirs from […]

2022-11-15T12:02:55-05:00November 15th, 2022|Nursing, nursing stories, wellness|0 Comments

Not to Save the World, But to Care, One Life at a Time

A nurse ponders the question of what makes her work matter.

Illustration by Janet Hamlin for AJN.

The Reflections column in AJN‘s August issue, “To Care When There Isn’t Enough,” is by Alison Stoltzfus, an obstetrics nurse at Evangelical Community Hospital in Lewisburg, PA. Stoltzfus describes her experience volunteering as a nurse at a medical clinic in the world’s largest refugee camp, the Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhiya, Bangladesh.

The work could be overwhelming at times. The camp she describes is a place where human illness and suffering often far exceed the capacities of available medical resources. She writes:

Some days the people would throng me in triage, pulling on my clothes and begging to be seen, desperation and longing in their eyes. A longing that at times I had to refuse.

Every day I would ask myself—“How can one care in a setting like this, and make a difference?” What good was it to make a difference to a few when there were so many lives I could not touch and so many problems we could not heal?

One life at a time.

The story centers around the author’s efforts to use the minimal medical equipment available to help […]

Psych Nursing: When the Goal Becomes ‘Simply Caring, Not Curing’

“As nurses we all care. It’s what we do. We care until our hearts hurt like an overused muscle. To find myself presiding over a void of trapped souls was not what I thought I was getting into…”

Ben Blennerhassett/ Unsplash

The above passage is from the Reflections essay, “The Suffering of Simone,” in the April issue of AJN. The author, Eileen Glover, is a psychiatric RN in New England, and her one-page essay reflects on the arc of her relationship with a patient who much of the time seems unreachable.

The essay brings to life the question of how a nurse, trained to heal or at least to soothe, can find an attitude of acceptance with patients whose psychiatric disorders defy all treatments and—most of the time—prevent meaningful contact between nurse and patient. […]

An ICU Nurse Reflects on ‘Returning Home from COVID Island’

“It’s hard to remember my job before all this began,” writes critical care nurse Deirdre McNally in this month’s Reflections essay, “Returning Home from COVID Island.” As the pandemic abates, she finds herself searching for a coherent narrative to understand what she’s experienced. But it’s not so simple. Memories of patients, moments, stray images from many months before slip unbidden into her head.

The difficulty of making sense of the past two years.

What does it mean to ‘make meaning’ from such an all-consuming experience? Maybe the answer will come with time. For now, she suggests, there are too many events, too many emotions and impressions to really absorb as things slowly resume a semblance of greater normalcy:

“For many health care providers,” she writes, “I think this is a protective mechanism meant to shield us from experiences too difficult to absorb.”

[…]

In All Nature’s Glory: One Patient’s Presurgical Ritual

‘Join me.’

I walked into the preoperative waiting area one morning, ready to begin my day. Standing outside my first patient’s bed bay, I asked through the drawn curtain if I could enter. Silence. I waited and then called out the patient’s name again. Again, nothing. I peeked behind the curtain. There was the patient standing in all of nature’s glory, arms extended in front of the window—eyes closed.

I stepped back and then heard her say, “Come in, join me.” I felt caught off guard, unsure of what to do. But I was also curious, so I went in.

The patient turned her head towards me and said, “Just stand next to me—the collective mind brings more energy.”

So I did. The view from this patient’s room showed a river running alongside the facility. Like her, I looked out onto the river. The sun was beginning to rise and the sky was a beautiful blend of pink and blue. I closed my eyes and a sense of serenity gently settled over me.

We stood together in silence for just a minute or two. Then the patient turned to me, grabbed her gown, and said, “Now, how can I help you?”

I found that I was smiling as I heard myself […]

2021-10-27T09:46:54-04:00October 27th, 2021|Nursing, nursing stories, patient engagement|1 Comment
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