A COVID-Era Telehealth Appointment Drives Home the Fragility and Strength of the Therapeutic Relationship

The Reflections essay in this month’s AJN is by LaRae Huyck, a psychiatric mental health NP. In this one-page story with a dramatic COVID-era twist, she explores her years accompanying a young counseling patient from suicidal depression during adolescence to joyful engagement with life as she heads out into the world on her own. Writes Huyck:

The time I spent with her seems so short, but in actuality it made up nearly a fourth of her life. We had traveled though the awkward adolescent years, the landmine of her parents’ divorce, the loss of a beloved grandmother, and a failed relationship that ended her dreams of a prom date.”

The healing power of a therapeutic relationship.

“The Importance of Time” adroitly summarizes this journey, revealing the author’s compassion for this young woman and her hopes for her as well. It’s a story of healing and growth that reveals the good that therapeutic relationships coupled with medication can do for some patients. […]

2021-01-11T13:47:05-05:00January 11th, 2021|mental illness, narratives, Nursing, Patients|0 Comments
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An Intimate Glimpse of Community Health Nursing During the Pandemic  

Photo courtesy of Monica M. Finifrock.

We hear a lot about frontline nurses and the trauma they’ve endured throughout the year fighting the world’s deadliest pandemic in 100 years. Their stories are harrowing and heroic and shine a much deserved spotlight on the importance of the profession. And yet COVID-19 has touched not only those working in ICUs and EDs—but in every area of health care. Our December In the Community article, “Keeping Calm in the Buffer Zone,” is just one example of a nurse touched by COVID-19 in her daily work.

Community health as a ‘buffer zone.’

When the article opens, author Monica M. Finifrock is on her way to work at a community health clinic in Seattle. It’s April and the pandemic is beginning to take a toll.

I don’t consider myself on the front lines of the pandemic . . . I’m not watching patients take their last gasps of air or making hard decisions about who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t. I’m a community health nurse, and my role during the COVID-19 pandemic is to do exactly what I always strive to do—serve the community.

Calling her clinic a “buffer zone,” Finifrock argues that community health clinics are […]

2020-12-10T08:42:36-05:00December 10th, 2020|COVID-19, narratives, nursing stories, Public health|0 Comments
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‘Didn’t You Used to Be a Nurse?’: Finding the Nurse Within

The author of the Reflections essay in AJN‘s September issue, Kathleen Resnick, confronts a question many nurses must confront at some point: what is it to be a nurse?

And a related question: what is the essence of nursing work? If you can no longer work as a nurse because of physical constraints or for another reason, are you still a nurse?

Writes Resnick in “A Different Kind of Nurse“:

My nursing career was spent in hospitals, working mostly in critical care as a bedside nurse, then in management. I worked hard and my work was a large part of my sense of self-worth. I loved patient care and the satisfaction of making a difference. As a manager, I felt my  primary mission was to enable those I served to do their best work. . . . I was somebody. Now what am I? An acquaintance asked me, “Didn’t you used to be a nurse?”

[…]

2020-09-15T16:23:15-04:00September 15th, 2020|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing stories|2 Comments
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Documentary Filmmaker: The ED Reflects Everything Going on in Our Country

A new documentary profiles emergency nurses.

If you think the photo on the cover of the September issue is dramatic, it’s because it was taken during the emergency treatment of a young man with a gunshot wound. (See On the Cover for details.)

The photo is from the new film by filmmaking team Carolyn Jones and Lisa Frank, In Case of Emergency, which was made in concert with the Emergency Nurses Association to mark its 50th anniversary.

Michelle Lyon, RN, an ED nurse at the University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital, Lexington.

The film’s release is scheduled for October 14th, the beginning of Emergency Nurses Week, and we highlight the film in a photo-essay in the September issue. (The article is free until the end of the month, and best viewed as a pdf.)

The film follows the work of ED nurses in several parts of the country. As a former ED nurse, I was struck by the ability of these filmmakers to accurately capture the work.

Scenes […]

2020-09-10T14:18:29-04:00September 10th, 2020|narratives, Nursing|0 Comments
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Healing Words: A Critical Care Book Club

I was always a reader. The days of the Scholastic book fair during elementary school were among my favorites. Although it doesn’t appear in my CV, my first job was working in the school store. With every shift I worked, the smell of blank sheets of paper, the thrill of a pencil awaiting to be sharpened to that perfect point, or the ballpoint and ink pens in a rainbow of colors stole my hard-earned quarters.

‘Is it on the NCLEX?’

But reading novels during nursing school was just plain hard. There were competing priorities, a brain brimming with vital information, and sheer exhaustion at the end of the day. Assigned readings presented an overwhelming amount of contextual information. And then there was the constant attention to evidence, protocols, and clinical practice guidelines. The “need to know” information took priority; the sheer pleasure of losing oneself in a story—whether novel or memoir—was lost.

During my senior year, in an advanced illness course, my professors assigned a novel-style memoir, Bed Number Ten by Sue Baier. To this day, I can remember the reactions to the assignment: “A book? Who has time for that?” “Are we going to be tested on this book?”

Or, most importantly: “Is it on the NCLEX?”

The influence of a patient’s story on […]

2019-05-29T08:45:40-04:00May 29th, 2019|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories|2 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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