Best Wishes from AJN for the Winter Holidays and Coming Year
How Can You Bear to Be a Nurse? A Classic Question Revisited
In 1987, Mary Mallison, editor of AJN, posed a provocative question in her editorial: “How can you bear to be a nurse?” She offered several questions that the public often asks nurses, and provided clever (and sometimes powerful) responses that nurses could use to correct the public’s misunderstanding. A few examples:
How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight of blood?
Wait until you slide a catheter into a tiny vein just before it collapses. The flashback of blood you see will make you sing.
How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight and smell of feces?
Wait until you’ve been anxious about the diarrhea that nothing has stopped in an AIDS patient. Finally, your strategies work and you see and smell normal stool. You’ll welcome that smell.
How can you be a nurse? So many of your patients are so old, so sick, these days. How can you bear the thought that, in the end, your care may make no difference?
Wait until you’ve used your hands and eyes and voice to dispel terror, to show a helpless person that his life is respected, that he has dignity. Your caring helps him […]
The Gift of Feedback
By Giulia May/Unsplash
In a recent Schwartz Rounds session at my hospital, the facilitators centered the discussion around the theme, “The Gift of Feedback.” As I listened to the panelists share their experiences, I recalled two recent exchanges with colleagues I’ve developed positive working relationships with over the years.
One was with a hardworking care partner (CP) who has been in our unit for about six years. The other exchange was with an attending physician who had been a well-respected leader in our PICU long before my 11 years working there. I find both to be very kind and very professional.
Asking a care partner for feedback.
As one of the more experienced bedside nurses in our unit, about once every four to six weeks I fill the role of relief charge nurse. I’ve done it enough over the years to feel decently comfortable in the role, but I do it so infrequently that each time I find myself relearning aspects of the role.
The charge nurse always sits in the same station as the care partner who manages the front desk. This individual gets a close-up view of how all the different relief charge nurses handle the role. One day towards the end of a busy shift, I turned […]
What Have We Learned About Preventing School Shootings?
On November 30, a 15-year-old sophomore at Oxford High School in Michigan killed four students and injured seven others. Both the student and his parents are presently incarcerated and charged with numerous crimes.
In the days following this tragic event, questions arose regarding what the parents and school might have done to prevent this from happening. The parents are facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and a federal lawsuit, perhaps the first of others to follow, has been filed against the school district alleging that more could have and should have been done.
Warning signs and preventive actions.
With each school shooting we again find ourselves asking ourselves what can be learned in terms of warning signs and actions that could be taken. The September Mental Health Matters column in AJN, which I co-authored with Arlene Holmes—whose son James was responsible for the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012—highlighted warning signs that might indicate potential violence by someone experiencing mental health problems.
What can be learned from the events that unfolded in Oxford that could be applied to a similar scenario, perhaps heading off another tragedy? The following checklist compiled by Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate youth to prevent […]
Distinguishing Between Delirium and Dementia in a Mother’s Rapid Decline
We now know just how vulnerable older adults in long-term care have been during the pandemic. COVID-19, especially in the pandemic’s early months, cost many their lives far too early. Even today we are seeing the disease bring premature death to the elderly, especially at facilities with lower staff vaccination rates. Just two days ago, NBC news reported the following disheartening NEJM study results:
“People in nursing homes are much more likely to die of Covid-19 if the staff caring for them remains largely unvaccinated, a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found.”
Other forms of decline accelerated by the lockdown.
But the isolation from family members and other external contacts imposed by the many months of lockdown had other less easy to measure costs. This month’s Reflections essay, “Again in a Heartbeat,” by Jeanne Kessler, MSN, RN-BC, details her own dawning awareness that something had begun to change in her mother as time went by during the lockdown at her assisted living facility.
Suddenly her mother couldn’t talk on the phone any longer. This wasn’t like her at all. Her attention span had shortened drastically. There were other worrisome indications. While […]