A Nurse Takes a Fall, and Loses More than Her Mobility

The Reflections essay in the July issue of AJN, “An Inconsolable Loss,” tells the story of a traumatic event that interrupts and forever changes a retired nursing professor’s relationship with her mother, “whose gentle touch and approving smile” she had always craved. Writes author Brenda Kelley Burke:

For a number of years, I’d made daily trips after work to a nursing home to visit my mother . . . .The roles of child and mother were now reversed because of her dementia. I felt acutely aware of the mother–child bond and how it transcends time and circumstance. How could I measure up to this wise and loving woman, who so many years ago would kiss my small feet before she put on my socks and whisper, ‘God, guide them to the safe places’?

But one bitterly cold and snowy night, writes Burke, “like the famous nursery rhyme character, I too had a great fall that left me broken.” Sometimes the seemingly fixed patterns of our lives depend on the most fragile of balances—one change can lead to many others, and suddenly nothing seems the same. […]

2017-07-05T11:03:05-04:00July 5th, 2017|narratives, nursing stories|1 Comment
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The Nurse Who Saw Me: Easing the Strain of a Mother’s Vigil

Illustration by Barbara Hranilovich. All rights reserved.

“The Nurse Who Saw Me,” the Reflections essay in the May issue of AJN, is by JR Fenn, a writer and lecturer in upstate New York. The author, who is not a nurse, describes a night of uncertainty she spent in an isolation room on a pediatric unit with her sick daughter.

This is the kind of writing that helps a reader understand the perspective of a scared parent in a disorienting and uncomfortable environment. The care is efficient, and the clinicians she encounters all seem to be doing the right things for her baby. But reassurance is not immediately forthcoming, as we see in this passage from near the beginning:

The attending looks at us over her white mask when I ask if my daughter is going to be OK. ‘There isn’t the research for babies this young,’ she says, her eyes so huge I can see my terrified face reflected in them. I can’t ask any more questions because my throat has swelled closed as I fight tears.

[…]

2017-05-10T11:09:22-04:00May 10th, 2017|Nursing, patient experience|0 Comments
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How a Nurse Quietly Helped One Intern Out of a Tricky Situation

Illustration by Annelisa Ochoa. All rights reserved Illustration by Annelisa Ochoa. All rights reserved

In this month’s Reflections essay, “My Turn,” a recently retired physician tells a story of how a nurse adroitly helped him through a very disorienting moment when he was still an intern. Here’s a bit of the setup:

Medicine was my first rotation as an intern. . . . [T]he medicine rotation had a particularly intimidating reputation and a red-hot I was not. I was terrified.

On morning rounds every day our entourage of physicians, nurses, and students would go room to room discussing each patient. I can still see the open door to Mrs. Finkelstein’s room near the morning sunlight at the end of the hallway. Mrs. Finkelstein was old and was dying. And every morning when we walked in, her husband was sitting there next to the bed, holding her hand. He told us regularly how many years they had been together. We each dreaded being the one on call when she died.

There are many situations in medicine and nursing that require a certain amount of experience—most readers will agree that this is definitely one of them. At a certain point in the story, the author finds himself being asked a question that absolutely needs to be answered, and answered immediately. It’s not […]

2016-11-21T13:01:41-05:00December 9th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|0 Comments
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Final Connection: An ICU Nurse Revises Her Feelings About Cell Phones

Illustration by Denny Bond. All rights reserved. Illustration by Denny Bond. All rights reserved.

Many of us have a love-hate relationship to smartphones, and each person (and generation) draws the line in the sand between invasiveness and usefulness in a different place. Cynthia Stock, the critical care nurse who wrote the Reflections essay in the November issue of AJN, “Final Connection,” starts her brief and moving story with honesty about such matters:

On Monday, if you had asked me how I feel about cell phones, I would have come up with this: I hate to listen to the drone of conversation coming from the person next to me on the treadmill at the gym. I don’t care about trouble with the HOA. I don’t care about a son who can’t decide on a career as a director or an actor. I work out to smooth the kinks in my soul from a job that requires me to navigate a relationship with life and death.

Today, ask me how I feel about cell phones. . . .

A good essay or story often centers around a reversal of some sort. What the protagonist believed may not be so true after all, or may be more complicated than first thought. As you can probably guess, in the […]

2016-11-21T13:01:49-05:00November 2nd, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|1 Comment
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One Nurse’s Ode to Fragility

Illustration by Lisa Dietrich for AJN. Illustration by Lisa Dietrich for AJN.

For nurses, the world outside work may from time to time seem as fragile and tenuous as the health of patients. Natural disasters threaten homes, illnesses afflict family members, the reminders of impermanence become too insistent. This month’s Reflections essay, “The Robin,” explores such emotional terrain with sensitivity and honesty.

Gentle warning: This is not an essay that neatly delivers a pearl of take-home wisdom at the end. But that’s what we liked about it. Sometimes the best we can do is hang in there and pay close attention. And, if we’re able and willing, write about it. Here are the opening few paragraphs of this short essay: […]

2016-11-21T13:01:56-05:00October 7th, 2015|narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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