Making Sense of Loss, Finding Strength as a Nurse

Maria, day 6.

It was bright outside, the sun was shining, and as I looked at the window in Room 303, I saw the light peering through. Maria, a 78-year-old Hispanic woman, mother of three, could not move and did not see that spring had begun as she struggled to breath. She looked at me with her helpless teary eyes trying to communicate, but I could not hear the words.

I’d d been Maria’s primary nurse for five of the six days that she has been hospitalized. During that time, I had witnessed the tension and anxiety that existed within her family around her admission with Covid-19. I hoped silently that a DNR order would be initiated if her breathing worsened instead of her being placed on a ventilator. But I tried not to express my feelings to her family about this when I helped them to communicate with and see their mother using FaceTime.

Maria’s family watched as she slowly declined, and saw how she didn’t respond to treatments. Feeling hopeless and overwhelmed, I tried to schedule a time to speak to my nursing manager about how I was feeling, but she was always too busy scheduling and assisting on the floor after other staff called in sick.

Hard […]

2021-05-13T10:24:41-04:00May 13th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|0 Comments
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Never Ever Stop Learning: Guidance for Today from Florence Nightingale

On Florence Nightingale’s 201st birthday, coming as it does each year at the end of Nurses Week—and this year after a year of unprecedented challenges for nurses around the globe—there’s no better time to revisit her career.

If she were here today, there’s no doubt she would have much to say and many insights. She helped envision a nursing that encompassed the compassion and professionalism of a skilled bedside nursing that was grounded in ethical principles, scientific and statistical evidence, and a spirit of inquiry.

In 2011, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, spent her summer vacation traveling through Europe pursuing a dream to learn more about the life and work of Florence Nightingale. In her dispatches from the road, posted one by one and collected here, Hassmiller reported on her trip, what she learned, and what it means to nurses’ work today.

Ten lessons learned from her life.

The culminating post in the series may be a good place to start, however, and to reread and contemplate as we face old challenges in ever new guises:

“Parting Thoughts: Ten Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life”

It begins, as one might expect, with “never, ever stop learning.” We couldn’t agree more.

2021-05-12T07:10:19-04:00May 12th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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A Year of Nursing, in Photos

During National Nurses Week, a reflection on nursing in the pandemic and plans to continue spotlighting the global contributions of nurses and midwives.

Photo courtesy of Jhpiego, by way of International Confederation of Midwives.

One photo shows a proning team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago turning a patient. The photo that accompanies this post shows a midwife in head-to-toe personal protective equipment as she provides breastfeeding counseling to a woman wearing a mask and holding her newborn in a hospital bed in Kabul, Afghanistan. A third focuses on more than 150 white clogs—each pair representing a nurse’s life lost during the pandemic—placed on the lawn outside the U.S. Capitol.

Reflections on the essential care nurses provided this year.

These are just some of the images included in the May issue’s feature article, “A Look Back at the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.” This photo-essay highlights the diverse experiences of nurses and midwives globally in the last year and the variety of ways they responded to these circumstances.

The photos depict resilience—a group of nurses and physicians with their names and smiley faces drawn on […]

2021-05-07T11:05:47-04:00May 7th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Honoring Nurses—Artfully

Artwork and collage by Rebecca Moses.

They’re not your typical images of nurses—no scrubs or PPE in sight. A series of portraits by fashion designer and artist Rebecca Moses depicts nurses in their own clothes, celebrating them as unique and vibrant individuals. The paintings, which are featured on AJN‘s May cover (at left) and contextualized in our On the Cover article, are currently on display at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital in an exhibition to thank nurses for their work.

The art project got its start on Instagram.

In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moses began posting daily portraits on Instagram of women who shared their lockdown stories with her. One woman who contacted Moses was the sister of Linda Valentino, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer of Mount Sinai West and vice-president of women’s and children’s services at the Mount Sinai Health System. Valentino’s sister told Moses about Linda’s work on the front lines of the pandemic. Inspired […]

2021-05-05T09:06:32-04:00May 5th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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How I Would Prepare My Child to Become a Nurse

‘Mommy, do you like your job?’

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

My five- and seven-year-old daughters are now old enough to understand that Mommy has a job as a nurse where she takes care of some pretty sick patients. From what I gather, their young minds really only seem to grasp that sometimes Mommy comforts her patients when they don’t feel well. As much as I would love to explain to them that my work as a pediatric ICU nurse is much more complicated and challenging than this, I also don’t mind them seeing me as someone who comforts others as a key part of my job.

But lately my five-year-old has started asking me more questions about my job: “What kind of patient did you take care of? How was your day at work? Do you like your job?” As one with a strong disdain for fluffy answers, even to a five-year-old, I’ve found myself considering how to answer her in a way that is both age-appropriate and honest.

When she asked if I liked my job, I thought about my patient writhing in agony yesterday—his loving parent present in the room—as we struggled to perform necessary interventions while also looking […]

2021-05-03T09:46:09-04:00May 3rd, 2021|Nursing|5 Comments
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