The Pitfalls of Being the ‘Nice’ Patient: A Nurse’s Perspective

Image Brent Keane/via Pexels

I have often heard health care professionals in various environments say, “If you’re nice to the nurses and doctors who take care of you, you’ll get better care.” As a bedside nurse myself, I understand the sentiment. No busy health care worker loves being met with antagonism or pressing demands that don’t strike us as critically urgent.

But when my husband and I both became patients with serious illnesses last year, we learned the clinical pitfalls of being the nice patients. I am left wondering how patients should be expected or permitted to advocate for their own care without worrying that they will be frowned upon or brushed off because they’re perceived as “difficult.”

First cautionary tale.

In early 2022, I discovered a small lump under my right breast that I initially wrote off as a cyst. Surely, I told myself, as a woman in her mid-40s with no risk factors for breast cancer, this had to be benign. A screening mammogram in May 2022 gave me an all-clear, and I went on my way.

But by November, I knew the lump had grown. I reached out to my PCP to ask for a diagnostic mammogram, and he emailed back a casual reassurance. “I know you’re worried, […]

2024-02-07T16:57:09-05:00February 6th, 2024|Nursing, nursing stories, patient experience, Patients|14 Comments
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How to Support the Nurse in Your Life

A quick Google search for “how to support nurses” reveals an emphasis on recommendations for hospital management on developing structured support for nurses at an organizational level. The search also captures popular articles on how nurses provide support to their patients. Ironically, the query results provide no resources to inform the nurse’s closest support system—families and friends—as well as the general public about what kind of support the nurse really needs and how to better provide it.

I attribute these search results, at least partly, to the fact that we nurses don’t always know how to articulate what we need. Some forms of support, such as treating a nurse to a mani-pedi or a spa day (or a parallel form of relaxation for our male colleagues) are of course always appreciated. But I’m talking about support of a more substantial sort, and this is why:

The reality: Consider the real experience, and thus the real needs, of the nurse.

When I consider the experience of nurses shuttling between full 12-hour shifts immersed in the care of complex and sometimes dying patients and periods of comparatively calm ordinary life with family and friends, I sometimes think of military members who have witnessed the horrors of war and are seeking to reenter “normal” life in a peaceful country. While members of […]

2018-01-18T10:07:18-05:00June 14th, 2017|Nursing|6 Comments
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Blogroll Housecleaning Note

"N-R-O-G super suds housecleaning week&qu...

This is just to say that we’ve done some minor housekeeping and deleted links to a number of blogs that have been asleep several months or longer. There’s nothing personal in this, and please let us know if one of these was yours and you’ve decided to revive your blog, give it an infusion of new design and energy, or the like. We want our blogroll to be useful, and it won’t be perceived as useful if we’re linking to sites that have gone dark. Please also let us know if there’s a really great nurse blog that we don’t know about, even if it’s yours. We can’t guarantee that we’ll link to it, but we’ll certainly check it out.—JM, blog editor

2016-11-21T13:10:44-05:00February 9th, 2012|healthcare social media|14 Comments
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Drunk on Water, Drug Shortages, Understanding Health Care News, Plus Nursing Blog Posts of Note

The water myth: A physician, writing in the British Medical Journal (abstract only), has looked at the evidence for drinking eight glasses of water a day and says the oft-recommended practice is “debunked nonsense,” a myth the bottled water companies have been only too happy to exploit and that many respected health care organizations and experts continue to support. Maybe common sense reasoning is also partly to blame—after all, the idea seems to make sense. And all that water certainly conjures images of purification, which is inevitably appealing in a world of pervasive toxins, chemicals, food additives, and the like, and in a time when fewer people in any given Western country practice the same or similar religious sacraments or rituals, practices that may—among other functions—have once served a similar “purifying” psychologic purpose.

Drug shortages: The Wall Street Journal Health Blog has reported on two surveys that suggest that “unprecedented” drug shortages are being experienced by most hospitals. The reasons are multiple: shortage rumors that prompt hoarding, FDA actions that halt production, lack of a crucial ingredient, poor inventory management, and others:

All treatment categories were affected, hospitals said, with 80% or more respondents experiencing shortages of surgery/anesthesia, emergency care, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal/nutrition, pain or infectious disease drugs. And 66% of hospitals reported shortages of cancer drugs. Some […]

2016-11-21T13:12:26-05:00July 15th, 2011|healthcare social media, Nursing|5 Comments
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Notes from the Nursosphere: Blogging Ethics, Tar Ball Vacation, Treating the Whole Person

Here’s a few things that got our attention late this week:

Chronic Disease Expert: U.S. Health Care Needs to Treat the ‘Whole Person’: At Kaiser Health News, a Q & A with a Stanford University chronic disease expert (who started her health care career as a registered nurse) focuses on the fragmentation of our health care system. Here’s a sample:

Q. Could the health care system do a better job addressing chronic disease?

A. The system would probably need to be totally reorganized if it was really going to do that. Right now, it addresses diseases or even parts of diseases or small sub-parts of the body. It does not address the whole, complex person with multiple chronic diseases. So, right now, what happens, if you’re lucky, you go to a primary care doc who kind of does the day-to-day stuff and then you see four or five specialists each of which do their little specialty part — none of whom really talk to each other except maybe to look at your laboratory tests on an electronic medical record if you’re really lucky.

It is totally uncoordinated. It’s chaotic. It serves pieces of people, not whole people.

Mental Health Impact of BP Spill Multiplies: Feel depressed and hopeless about the Gulf Oil Spill? At Covering Health, an article sketches out some of the journalistic work being done to look at what some people have actually begun calling “Gulf Oil Syndrome.”

Speaking of the oil spill, Sean Dent, a nurse who blogs at My Strong Medicine, has a recent post called 

2016-11-21T13:17:01-05:00June 25th, 2010|healthcare social media, 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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