A Nurse Cartoonist Worth Checking Out

Drawing on Experience is a blog run by a student who’s been completing an accelerated BSN program in nursing and who illustrates his education and personal life with remarkably subtle and witty cartoons. Hat tip to a recent Change of Shift blog roundup at Emergiblog for letting us know about his work. It would be wrong to reproduce this artist’s work here without permission, and he might not like it, so I’m just including a really really tiny version of a recent cartoon illustrating his induction into the nursing honor society. It links back to his original Web site, where you can see this and many other cartoons in full, legible size (and of course, upon request, we’ll gladly remove the thumbnail image here!).

What makes this artist’s work so much fun? The tongue-in-cheek, martial-arts-disciple-and-wise-man narrative? The humility and sense of pleasure in life’s ironies and challenges? The quality of line? The attention to apparently trivial details? The way his mini-narratives play with genre conventions? At any rate, it’s a welcome addition to the nursosphere; I don’t see any contact info on this artist’s blog, but we hope he’ll find time to continue (and consider letting us publish one of his drawings on the blog or in AJN).—JM, senior editor/blog editor

2016-11-21T13:15:41-05:00September 17th, 2010|career, nursing perspective, students|1 Comment
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After the Angels: In Search of A ‘Knowledge-Based’ Professional Identity

If you’re looking for angels, you’ve come to the wrong place. So says GuitarGirlRN in her latest blog post.

One stereotype of nursing (and it’s perpetuated by nurses as well as by those not in the medical or nursing fields) that bothers me is that of nurses as “angels of mercy.”

We’re expected to smile while up to our elbows in bloody shit and vomit, be pleasant to rude and sometimes violent people, put up with crap from doctors, managers, patients, their families, nurse techs, and janitors yet keep our cool, never cry, never sweat, never lose our tempers with each other, always be prepared and be right there when we are needed.

Her point is that nurses are human; they do the best they can with scant resources, but they aren’t superhuman. They aren’t saints, they have lives of their own, and they can’t always be all things to all people. Back in 2005, noted author Suzanne Gordon wrote, with Sioban Nelson, an article for us called “An End to Angels.” In it, they presented the idea that nursing is a profession with a serious image problem, one that undercuts recruitment efforts and ill prepares new nurses for the reality of their work. The arguments in the article are subtle and thought provoking, and impossible to summarize. Here, anyway, is the introduction:

Nurses often disagree on the causes of and possible solutions to the current nursing shortage. Mandatory staffing ratios versus Magnet hospitals? Sign-on bonuses […]

2016-11-21T13:15:44-05:00September 14th, 2010|career, nursing perspective|4 Comments
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A Nurse So Cold

Al is weak, frail, and most important, scared. At 55 years of age, after 34 years providing care, she finds herself in a major medical center— on her back, staring at ceiling tiles. The woman who’s always had skin as pure as a china doll now ironically has a porcelain hip. She’s just 36 hours out from a total hip replacement, and she knows something is wrong. She feels her heart pounding, she can hear the beating in her ears, feel the pulsing on her pillow. She rings the call bell to ask for the nurse to check her. An hour comes and goes, and no one comes to her room.

That’s from the August Reflections essay, titled “Miss Orienting Nurse.” The author is Linda Pellico, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Nursing, who tells of her chagrin at witnessing rote care provided to a hospitalized friend by a former student of hers. We hope you’ll read the essay and let us know your own experiences as a nurse or patient—or both. How many of us will someday have to rely on such cold and distant figures as the nurse and MD portrayed in this essay?-JM, senior editor

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2016-11-21T13:16:06-05:00August 16th, 2010|career, nursing perspective, students|2 Comments
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Social Media and Nurses — Does Betty White Have a Point?

50 Social Media Icons/Ivan Walsh, via Flickr

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I’ve been extremely busy and have had trouble finding time to write a post for this blog. And it’s not enough just to write a post—we’ve got to think about what should go on Facebook and what should be Tweeted, whether we should do a mention in the eNewsletter and if a topic deserves a spot on AJN’s home page. All this communication takes time.

When she hosted Saturday Night Live, the inimitable Betty White acknowledged all the fans on Facebook who were the driving force behind the campaign to have her become the host. She confessed she didn’t know what Facebook was, and said, “Now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it seems like a huge waste of time.”

Facebook and Twitter sort of remind me of the Valentine’s Day card exchange in grammar school—everyone bought boxes of 100 cards (actually, more like small, cheap postcards) so you could give them out and, hopefully, get as many in return. It was about the number of cards you could collect—even if they were from classmates you didn’t care about or even disliked. You felt good if you had lots of cards and people saw […]

2016-11-21T13:16:12-05:00August 9th, 2010|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Embley Park: Where It All Began

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN (5th in a series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career) 

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever be at the home of Florence Nightingale. But here I am, not only visiting her family’s estate, Embley Park, but sleeping here for the next four days. […]

2016-11-21T13:16:42-05:00July 14th, 2010|career, nursing perspective|5 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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