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Recognizing and Managing Late or Long-Term Complications in Adult Allo-HSCT Survivors

By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

Everybody, myself included, thought he was going to die. Another nurse on another floor had administered his stem cell transplant a few weeks prior, but as his primary nurse I was now in charge of managing its aftereffects.

Ben (not his real name, and some details have been changed) was one of the many young patients I’d cared for who suffered from a violent course of complications following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (allo-HSCT). Intractable diarrhea and skin sloughing led to graft-versus-host-disease’s usual sequelae: wounds, drug-resistant infections, looming sepsis. The walls of his bladder, scarred and irritated by the myriad of toxic drugs he’d been given, bled. One day, while I slept at home between night shifts, he lost so much blood that they rushed him to the OR. The treatment—never before performed—stopped the bleeding. But it left him in excruciating, around-the-clock pain.

Between regular doses of Dilaudid and PCA pump pushes, he cried out to me, “I can’t do this. I don’t want this anymore.” I couldn’t blame him—his cancer fight raged on endlessly. Watching his boyishly handsome face grimace with so much pain, I remembered other young allo-HSCT patients’ faces, some of them peaceful only in the postmortem.

As it turned out, Ben survived his ICU stay. I heard about his discharge to the bone marrow transplant unit after I returned from a vacation. I lost touch with him, in the […]

Amanda Anderson, MPA, MSN, RN2016-11-21T13:01:46-05:00November 17th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments

Check my Conduct: Committing to a Better Way to Act with Colleagues

Christina Purpora, PhD, RN, is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions. She has 30 years of hospital nursing experience.

by Steve Robbins/Flickr Creative Commons

I wonder whether any of my nurse colleagues can recall having said or done something less than kind to a peer at work. Looking back over 30 years of nursing, I am aware of times that I could have been kinder. Not too long ago, the way that Emily—a less experienced nurse who was new to our unit—conducted herself in response to my reaction to her request for help taught me that I ought to consider a better way to act.

Request for Help
I was walking out of a patient’s room when Emily greeted me by name, then said, “Ms. S has one of the new IV pumps and the alarm keeps going off. I can’t figure out what’s wrong. Can you please help me?”

I felt annoyed at her for making one more demand on my time when I could barely keep up with my current assignment. Rolling my eyes, I curtly replied, “Emily, I think you can handle it. You had the in-service like everybody else.”

Seemingly unrattled by my terse retort, Emily stood her ground. “Yes,” she told me, “I […]

Guest Author2016-11-21T13:01:47-05:00November 10th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|2 Comments

Ebola, One Year Later: What We Learned for the Next Big Epidemic

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

Scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles budding from an infected VERO E6 cell (35,000x magnification). Credit: NIAID

U.S. hospitals have not seen a case of Ebola virus disease since November 11, 2014, when Dr. Craig Spencer was discharged from Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. While the number of new infections has declined dramatically in the West African countries where the 2014–2015 epidemic began, it is virtually certain that the disease will continue to resurface.

This epidemic was by far the largest and most geographically widespread Ebola epidemic to date, with approximately 28,000 cases (suspected, probable, or confirmed) and more than 11,000 deaths in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, the three hardest-hit countries. The seven other countries affected account for a combined total of 34 confirmed (and two probable) cases and 15 deaths.

According to a recent WHO report, these numbers include (through March of this year) 815 confirmed or probable cases among health care workers, more than half of whom were nurses or nurses’ aides. (Doctors and medical students made up about […]

Betsy Todd, MPH, RN2016-11-21T13:01:48-05:00November 6th, 2015|healthcare social media, infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|11 Comments

Final Connection: An ICU Nurse Revises Her Feelings About Cell Phones

Many of us have a love-hate relationship to smartphones, and each person (and generation) draws the line in the sand between invasiveness and usefulness in a different place. Cynthia Stock, the critical care nurse who wrote the Reflections essay in the November issue of AJN, “Final Connection,” starts her brief and moving story with honesty about such matters:

On Monday, if you had asked me how I feel about cell phones, I would have come up with this: I hate to listen to the drone of conversation coming from the person next to me on the treadmill at the gym. I don’t care about trouble with the HOA. I don’t care about a son who can’t decide on a career as a director or an actor. I work out to smooth the kinks in my soul from a job that requires me to navigate a relationship with life and death.

Today, ask me how I feel about cell phones. . . .

A good essay or story often centers around a reversal of some sort. What the protagonist believed may not be so true after all, or may be more complicated than first thought. As you can probably guess, […]

Jacob Molyneux, senior editor/blog editor2016-11-21T13:01:49-05:00November 2nd, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment

Medical Marijuana: A Nurse’s Primer

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN, is an oncology nurse navigator and writes a monthly post for this blog.

Illustration by J Paradisi.

Since I wrote “Marijuana Legalization and Potential Workplace Pitfalls for Nurses Who Partake” in July 2014, a few things have changed. For one, Measure 91 passed in Oregon, making it the third state to legalize recreational marijuana. Medical marijuana, however, has been legal since 1998 in Oregon, currently one of 23 states nationwide.

Also, when I wrote the earlier post, I was an infusion nurse—now, as an oncology nurse navigator, I’m asked about medical marijuana often, and I need to know the answers, as do all nurses practicing in states with legalized medical marijuana. Nurses working in oncology, emergency departments, pain management, infusion clinics, and pediatrics have high exposure to patients with medical marijuana cards.

By ‘knowledge,’ I don’t mean knowing everything, but knowing where to find what you need to know. In Oregon, for example, information about medical marijuana is found at the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP). The Web site includes qualifying diagnoses, a downloadable handbook, an application packet with instructions, and a list of approved dispensaries. While retail issues surrounding recreational marijuana are still being sorted out, medical dispensaries in Oregon sell recreational marijuana to clients aged 21 and older.

Patients using medical […]

Julianna Paradisi, RN, OCN2016-11-21T13:01:50-05:00October 27th, 2015|nursing perspective, Patients|0 Comments

Recognizing and Managing Late or Long-Term Complications in Adult Allo-HSCT Survivors

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Check my Conduct: Committing to a Better Way to Act with Colleagues

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Ebola, One Year Later: What We Learned for the Next Big Epidemic

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Final Connection: An ICU Nurse Revises Her Feelings About Cell Phones

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Medical Marijuana: A Nurse’s Primer

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