Tilting the Earth

Elizabeth R. Plumer, PhD, JD, is a biochemist and intellectual property attorney. She lives in Saco, ME.

When an MRI revealed that my four-year-old daughter’s brain cancer had returned, I took the only action possible: I bought a dog. I scoured the Sunday papers and found just the puppy I was looking for, a Rottweiler. No deep psychological analysis was necessary to decipher my choice. I wanted a dog to protect my daughter from external threats, even if it could not protect her from the one threat that mattered most.

We named our puppy, Maggie, after Rod Stewart’s Maggie May, because from the moment she entered our lives, she stole our hearts. Maggie whimpered through that first night until I fell asleep on the couch with her gently snoring on my chest.

It was like having a newborn in the house again, and just as I had filled photo albums of my daughters, I took pictures of Maggie and my girls together. In one, taken the first summer we had her, Maggie lies in the shade beneath the swing set as if on sentry duty for my four-year-old and her seven-year-old sister. My girls hold steady on their swings and smile into the camera. The younger one wears one of my husband’s T-shirts over her bathing suit and sports a pixie haircut, the […]

2016-11-21T13:10:51-05:00January 30th, 2012|patient engagement, patient experience|6 Comments
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Clinic Vision

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

By Ctd 2005, via Flickr

I’ve begun volunteering at a local free clinic. While it’s been rewarding and satisfying, it’s also been fraught with challenges I didn’t expect; I’ve only worked in an ICU, and the assessment skills specific to critical care don’t translate smoothly to the clinic setting. I’m out of my professional comfort zone, and I feel so inexperienced.

Here’s what I’m used to: By the time a patient is admitted to the ICU, they’ve already been “worked up” in the emergency room. Physicians have been assigned and a preliminary diagnosis is in place. The patients are connected to equipment that displays their vital data continuously, on monitors I can see from almost anywhere, and alarms are triggered by any alterations. I’ve got easy access to radiology reports and films, laboratory values, and microbiology reports. The nursing physical assessment is thorough and paramount; I know what I’m looking for, what I’m listening and feeling for, what certain smells indicate, and I trust my instincts. I’m accustomed to not only the forced intimacy that comes with the in-depth physical assessments of critical care, but the technology and data that supplement my assessments, as well.

At the clinic my nursing role is quite different. I sit at a desk. I am […]

2016-11-21T13:10:52-05:00January 26th, 2012|nursing perspective, Patients, Public health|2 Comments
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Poll: What Can We Actually Do About Hospital Room Noise?

By ArtsieApsie, via Flickr

Fierce Healthcare reports this week on the latest findings about hospital room noise: “hospital rooms can be as noisy as chainsaws, according to a new study [subscription required] published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine….The average noise level in patient rooms was close to 50 decibels….The noise disruptions mostly come from staff conversation, roommates, alarms, intercoms and pagers….Loud hospital rooms are associated with clinically significant sleep loss among patients and even may hinder recovery.”

So, nurses (and patients, MDs, others): can anything be done about this? Does your hospital do anything? Take our poll, and also of course feel free to leave a comment on this post.—JM, senior editor

[polldaddy poll=5850198]
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2016-11-21T13:10:56-05:00January 17th, 2012|nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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Second Chances

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Soul on the Head of a Pin,” was published in the May 2010 issue of AJN.

by patchy patch, via flickr

I first met Ella (name and some details have been changed) when she was my patient in the intensive care unit. She’d been riding in a car she wasn’t supposed to be riding in, heading to a party she wasn’t supposed to be going to, high on drugs and not wearing a seatbelt when she was involved in a high-speed crash that left her with broken bones and internal injuries. She was in the ICU for more than a month.

Her situation wasn’t that remarkable. Ella could easily represent a common category of ICU admissions—the young adult who is often described by her parents as a “good girl,” yet who lives wildly, fearless and flip, taking risks as if consequences will never apply. I feel particularly protective of these patients, mostly because I relate to them, on some level. I remember the sense of invincibility that came with youth, and when I’m caring for these girls I often marvel at consequences I avoided in my own life. I shake my head at my younger self, alternating between […]

2016-11-21T13:11:05-05:00January 3rd, 2012|nursing perspective, Patients|5 Comments
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Those Who Wait: Recent Work in ‘Art of Nursing’

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“I held that stone / in my hand for hours while they split your bones,” says the narrator of Janet Parkinson’s poem “Talisman,” which appears this month in Art of Nursing. The poem speaks to the tremendous strain of waiting for the outcome of a loved one’s emergency surgery. It’s about the  need for connection over great distances, for a “stone constant” in the face of grave uncertainty. The poet’s voice is unsentimental and steady, and the poem, just seven lines, itself feels almost talismanic. (Art of Nursing is always free online—just click through to the PDF file.)

In Roger Davies’s poem “Preparing to Pretend to Knit at the Chemotherapy Clinic,” featured in October’s Art of Nursing, a husband also waits, feeling helpless. “I’ll choose the long, elegant needles,” he says, imagining homespun wools dyed in autumn colors. Recalling his mother’s “nonchalant / competence” at the craft, he longs for the solace found in knowing what to do—even if it’s only how to hold the needles. In the poem’s last lines, the narrator says, “I could look out the window / to this fading autumn day.” But it’s clear that he’s not quite ready to see that view yet.

Rebecca Thomas’s painting “The Waiting Room: Norma,” featured in November, depicts the artist’s grandmother, who […]

2016-11-21T13:11:08-05:00December 19th, 2011|Nursing, patient engagement|1 Comment
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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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