A Time to Heal: Taking a Break from Nursing After a Cancer Diagnosis

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Most nurses I know enjoy Nurses Week as an acknowledgment of the very important work we do every day. Nurses’ Week can also be an opportunity to think about our own needs, or to practice “self-care,” a term I find problematic because I worry it has become one of those ideas that nurses get blamed for the absence of, as in, a nurse is stressed on the job because he hasn’t done his “self-care.” However, regardless of how management discusses “self-care,” it’s an important idea: that nurses need breaks, moments to relax, have fun, and nourish our own humanity so that we come to work ready to humanely care for patients.

The problem with doing a hard job, like nursing, is that recovery is hard, too, and when the job itself seems to expect employees to be superhuman, finding the will to really care for ourselves can be difficult. I discovered how truly challenging that can be after being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in September 2017. At the time I was working as a per diem home hospice nurse and I knew instinctively that I could not care well for dying patients when I was […]

2022-05-09T09:20:58-04:00May 9th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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What Do Nurses Need?

“Covid-19 Is ‘Probably Going to End My Career’” is the title of my recent column in the New York Times. The nurse who made that statement spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because her hospital doesn’t like having nurses speak out. So—nurses are afraid to publicly complain about their difficulties on the job, struggle with a lack of PPE and short-staffing, and are overwhelmed by the number of deaths they are seeing. All this has led to the nursing profession being in crisis.

The six ideas below could help nurses drowning in difficulties imposed by Covid find their way back to solid ground.

  1. Staffing legislation. This could mean ratios, or some other way to insure that nurses are not expected to work short. The legislation should also require robust nursing float pools and keep secretarial and nursing assistant support at their usual levels. Units have to be staffed in a way that maximally benefits patients, not just to help balance a hospital’s bottom line.
  2. Mental health support. Nurses as a group are not always open to counseling, but during Covid nurses have spoken out about the emotional toll of the work and their ongoing PTSD. They have recognized their need for mental health support. Hospitals must give nurses health insurance that covers individual counseling, and have mental health resources available on the job for nurses. “Covid broke me” is being said by too many nurses, too often.

    3. […]

2021-03-05T09:52:27-05:00March 5th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing|1 Comment
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A Nurses’ Week Visit with Theresa Brown

Nurse and author Theresa Brown Nurse and author Theresa Brown

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with nurse Theresa Brown (you can listen to our conversation here). Brown writes AJN’s quarterly What I’m Reading column. (This month, she writes about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.)

Theresa Brown also blogs for the New York Times and is the author of The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, which I first wrote about when it was released last July. As I noted then, it’s probably the first book I’ve read that really captures certain elements of nurses’ work:

Anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be a nurse in a hospital today should read this book. Patients, families, and non-nurse colleagues tend to see nurses as ever-present yet often in the background, quietly moving from room to room, attending to patients, and distributing medications or charting at computers.

But what they don’t understand about what nurses do is what Brown so deftly describes—the cognitive multitasking and constant reordering of priorities that occur in the course of one shift as Brown manages the needs of four very different patients (she was working in a stem cell transplant unit at the time); completes admissions and discharges; and […]

2016-11-21T13:01:14-05:00May 4th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing stories, patient experience|2 Comments
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Working a Shift with Theresa Brown

bookBy Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Many of you may be familiar with Theresa Brown, nurse and author of Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, as well as a blogger for the New York Times. Brown also writes a quarterly column for AJN called What I’m Reading (her latest column, which will be free until August 15, is in the July issue). Her new book, The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives, will come out in September, and I was able to read a prepublication copy. (You can pre-order it.)

I don’t usually write book reviews. I think of most books like food: what one person finds delicious may be less savory to another. But I’m making an exception because this book is an accurate and well-written portrayal of nursing (at last!).

Anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be a nurse in a hospital today should read this book. Patients, families, and non-nurse colleagues tend to see nurses as ever-present yet often in the background, quietly moving from room to room, attending to patients, and distributing medications or charting at computers. But what they don’t understand about what nurses do is what Brown so deftly describes—the cognitive multitasking and constant reordering of priorities that occur in the course of one shift as Brown manages the needs of four very […]

2016-11-21T13:02:17-05:00July 20th, 2015|career, Nursing, nursing perspective|3 Comments
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When a Fellow Nurse Abuses Drugs on the Job

. . . the nurse wasn’t anywhere on the floor. I started looking around, asking other nurses. My frustration grew when I realized that something about the entire floor felt wrong. The entire night shift had disappeared. My chest tightened and I started to worry about what had happened at the hospital last night.

That’s a short excerpt from the Reflections essay in the October issue of AJN, “A Good Nurse.” It’s by oncology nurse Theresa Brown, who happens to also have a new column out this week at the New York Times Opinionator blog. Never one to shy away from sensitive topics, in this essay she takes on the shock and betrayal in learning a fellow nurse has been abusing drugs on the job. Click the link above or the image on the right to read the whole short essay (click through to the PDF version for the best reading experience). We welcome your responses here, of course.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor
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2016-11-21T13:09:12-05:00September 28th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|0 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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