“As nurses we all care. It’s what we do. We care until our hearts hurt like an overused muscle. To find myself presiding over a void of trapped souls was not what I thought I was getting into…”

Ben Blennerhassett/ Unsplash

The above passage is from the Reflections essay, “The Suffering of Simone,” in the April issue of AJN. The author, Eileen Glover, is a psychiatric RN in New England, and her one-page essay reflects on the arc of her relationship with a patient who much of the time seems unreachable.

The essay brings to life the question of how a nurse, trained to heal or at least to soothe, can find an attitude of acceptance with patients whose psychiatric disorders defy all treatments and—most of the time—prevent meaningful contact between nurse and patient.

The value of paying attention.

Glover asks the hard questions about what makes a patient’s life worth living, and finds no easy answers.

But most of all she describes how a simple respect, persistence, and attention to small physical details and small ways of comfort may enable some fleeting but real connection with patients. She observes:

“The goal became solely caring, not curing.”

In telling this small painful story, Glover may also be posing the question of what makes the work of a psychiatric RN meaningful. Each reader may have their own answer. The article will be free to read for the month of April. 

(AJN is always looking for honest and thoughtful nursing stories and reflections for the monthly Reflections column. Click here to see author guidelines for this and other AJN columns.)