By Hayley Jasper. All rights reserved.

Since March, AJN has been inundated with COVID-19–related manuscripts from around the world, ranging from prospective feature articles to submissions for this blog as well as our Reflections and Viewpoint columns. Not unexpectedly, we are also seeing many visual art and poetry submissions to our Art of Nursing column as we all try to make sense of this pandemic experience.

Art of Nursing selections.

In the July issue, we feature a drawing and two poems that reflect the times, as well as a reprint of a recent post from this blog.

The drawing, Behind the Front Lines, is by Hayley Jasper, an award-winning artist who is a junior in high school. Hayley’s piece was inspired by her mother, who is an ICU nurse in a COVID-19 unit.

The poem “Alone, surrounded” was written by Dublin geriatrician Shane O’Hanlon. Behavioral health nurse Marianne Broyles wrote the poem “Using Time Wisely During COVID-19.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

And I feel very small, like a field mouse.
It is all I can do to
Blend in and hope the great
Horned owl will pass me over…

We hope both poems will invite you to reflect on your own experiences at this time. (For the Art of Nursing drawing and poems, please click through to the downloadable PDF versions in the upper left of each landing page to get the best version.)

Care for yourself first.

And don’t forget to “put on your own oxygen first” during these stressful months. In “Practicing the ABCDEs of Self-Care in Pandemic Times,” psychiatric NP Diane Solomon offers a potentially more hopeful spin on all this stress:

“We are familiar with posttraumatic stress, but what’s less known is a very real concept called posttraumatic growth, which occurs when we transform adversity into resilience and growth.”

For nurses, our commitment to the people we care for is often our “default” setting. Especially during trying times, don’t forget to care for yourself, too.