Notes from the AIDS/HIV Epidemic for Nurses Working in the COVID Pandemic

The accounts of nurses working in the midst of this pandemic vividly remind me of my work as a nurse in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. I am reminded of the period when we did not know how the disease was transmitted, when we believed that caring for them involved great personal risk. I remember masking, gowning, and gloving every time I entered a patient room. I still recall the wonderful patients I had the opportunity to care for, and I understand that watching a patient die alone is the probably the most difficult experience that we will ever face as nurses.

I spent years on the front line of the AIDS epidemic and now am teaching future nurses. I am dedicated to helping nurses cope in times of crisis. We have chosen difficult work. Work that is more difficult than we could have possibly understood when we entered nursing school. Work that can also be extremely rewarding. I am proud to be a part of this noble profession, and I hope that it may be useful for me to share some of the things that I have learned.

1. It is extremely important to take care of your physical health.

I remember days I didn’t have […]

2020-11-09T09:46:50-05:00November 9th, 2020|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Many in Health Care Have Made Sense of COVID Through Art or Poetry

By Hayley Jasper. All rights reserved.

Since March, AJN has been inundated with COVID-19–related manuscripts from around the world, ranging from prospective feature articles to submissions for this blog as well as our Reflections and Viewpoint columns. Not unexpectedly, we are also seeing many visual art and poetry submissions to our Art of Nursing column as we all try to make sense of this pandemic experience.

Art of Nursing selections.

In the July issue, we feature a drawing and two poems that reflect the times, as well as a reprint of a recent post from this blog.

The drawing, Behind the Front Lines, is by Hayley Jasper, an award-winning artist who is a junior in high school. Hayley’s piece was inspired by her mother, who is an ICU nurse in a COVID-19 unit.

The poem “Alone, surrounded” was written by Dublin geriatrician Shane O’Hanlon. Behavioral health nurse Marianne Broyles wrote the poem “Using Time Wisely During COVID-19.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

And I feel very small, like a field mouse.
It is all I can do to
Blend in and hope the great
Horned owl will pass me over…

We hope both poems will invite you […]

2020-08-07T09:58:10-04:00August 7th, 2020|Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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The Burden of Diabetes

It’s exhausting, it is exhausting. It really is, to constantly take care of yourself and have to worry about everything you eat, everything you do, every move you make.

Flickr / Harshit Sekhon

This quote is from the original research article in AJN’s December issue, “Experiences of Diabetes Burnout: A Qualitative Study Among People with Type 1 Diabetes.” (You can read it for free and can also earn CE credits.)

Defining burnout.

The report details the results of interviews conducted by the authors to learn more about diabetes burnout, a phenomenon they define as “a state of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion following an apathetic detachment from one’s illness identity, diabetes self-care behaviors, and support systems, which is commonly accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness.”

In the interview excerpt above, one of the study participants, a 36-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes, aptly describes the constant attention required to manage the disease. This relentless focus on time, diet, activity, and blood glucose levels are wearying in themselves. When this 24-7 effort is still not enough to control glucose levels, the resulting sense of frustration and lack of control contribute to burnout. […]

2019-12-17T10:05:56-05:00December 16th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Nurses Week Prizes We Really Need

Amanda Anderson, formerly a graduate intern at AJN, is now a contributing editor

Culture_of_Safety_2016My first Nurses Week as a nurse, my mother sent me a card and a small gift. When I opened it, I was surprised by its message—no one had ever given me anything for Nurses Week during nursing school. I had no idea that the holiday even existed.

As an English Literature major–turned nursing student, I was pretty clueless about the world of nursing when I launched my career. I spent most of my first year fumbling around in the dark, looking for Florence’s light.

As years passed, I learned more about nursing, claimed it as my own, and became versed in the industry secrets. I started to take pride in Nurses Week, seeing it as a venue for speaking out about nursing.

One year, for the thirty days preceding the holiday, I wrote to Google about 30 living nurse legends, in hopes that they would post a nursing-themed Google Doodle for our week. On another, I penned (and never sent) a scathing letter to a hospital president who had sent a kitschy card I took offense to.

[…]

2023-01-30T10:51:51-05:00May 5th, 2016|career, Nursing, nursing perspective, patient safety|0 Comments
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Writer or Nurse? The Costs of an Untold Story

Amanda Anderson, BSN, RN, CCRN, works in critical care in New York City and is enrolled in the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing/Baruch College of Public Affairs dual master’s degree program in nursing administration and public administration. Her blog is called This Nurse Wonders.

via Wikimedia Commons via Wikimedia Commons

I found myself getting annoyed with a dying cancer patient today. I don’t think this is an occurrence any honest nurse would deny, but when I could feel my blood pressure rise every time she dry-heaved, I knew it’d been a mistake to come to work this morning.

Not my proudest moment.

You see, I’ve felt my nursing self change of late, with an urge growing within me to slowly step back from the bedside, at least for a bit. Perhaps it’s school and the clarification of future goals forming in my mind, but clinical work has felt more like job-work, and this other work, this future work that largely centers on telling my nursing story, is becoming what I think of as calling-work.

Staring down at my poor patient, I realized I’d swung the balance of bedside work and calling-work too much to one side lately. I’ve been working—as a nurse—too much, and working—as a writer and a student—too little. After seven years of bedside nursing, and the joys and trials of per diem […]

2016-11-21T13:04:34-05:00June 4th, 2014|career, healthcare social media, nursing perspective|8 Comments
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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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