Rarely do we consider what it might be like to see [a former student’s] face across the bed of a desperately ill loved one.   

Illustration by Janet Hamlin. All rights reserved.

That’s from AJN‘s May Reflections essay by nursing professor Amy Kenefick Moore, who shares her family’s experience over the hectic days that follow a terrible accident in which her stepson sustains critical injuries.

When her stepson is admitted to a hospital affiliated with her school of nursing, Moore reaches out on her university LISTSERV to ask the nurses working at that hospital to watch out for her family member. “Responses flew back,” with alumni working on the trauma service promising to take good care of Moore’s stepson.

Nurses as family members.

Whatever our nursing experience, when we’re on the scene as family members, we usually understand the basics of the clinical situation and its possibilities. Our knowledge of nursing and medicine and of our family member’s medical history, functional baseline, and beliefs about health and illness can be a great asset to those caring for our loved one.

The nurse in the family also functions as a kind of “sleeper agent,” able to gather and interpret information to help the rest of the family understand what’s going on. In this story, Moore shares the ways in which she interpreted her stepson’s condition and treatments to the rest of the family.

They said that afterward they might do a tracheostomy and a gastrostomy tube. The family looked at me, puzzled. “Good,” I said, “that’s good.”  It felt like hope. They thought he might live!

But it’s Moore’s own dependence upon and trust in former students that makes her narrative a different kind of “nurse as family member” experience. To read the full essay, see “My People, 2014” in the May issue of AJN.