I have a semester-long project to complete, called "The Journey of Caring". According to my syllabus: The "Journey of Caring" is an interactive approach to assist beginning nursing students to explore the art of nursing in addition to the science while developing clinical decision making skills. The journey will prepare you to recognize issues experienced by older patients and their families as they navigate the health care continuum. The project involves not only the art of nurisng but also addresses the general education skills of writing, interaction with the public, economics, nutrition, ethics, values, social issues, and problem solving. The project allows you to gain basic information about the health care environment outside the hospital while also building your time management skills. The project will include the use of communication tehcniques and understanding of yourself and how that knowledge might impact your relationship with clients."
The first part of the JOC project was to write a paper about "The Art of Nursing"-- reflecting on why we chose to become a nurse, our perception of what a nurse is, describe what caring means to us with a personal example to support the description, and to address how we feel about aging.....
Journey of Caring
The Art of Nursing
As cliché as it sounds, I still believe that nursing is all about “helping people.”
I was seven years old when I first decided what I wanted to be “when I grow up”, and I haven’t changed my mind even once over the last twenty years. My mother was in an extremely serious car accident, and when she was released from the hospital, she and I stayed with my grandparents until she was completely recovered. It was there that I dutifully helped my grandmother change my mother’s positions, clean her up, and change her bandages every single day. In the niaveness that only a young child can possess, I truly thought that I was solely responsible for her progress; and although I was saddened by her injuries, by the end of her recovery period, I had decided that I wanted to be a nurse.
One of my first patients as an STNA was a 36 year old male who had been completely paralyzed from the shoulders down from a motorcycle accident. When he first entered my facility, he was a complete-care patient, requiring a Hoyer lift to transfer him and a very minimum of two staff members to assist with any type of care. He was at the facility for a full three months. On the day he was discharged, I wheeled him to the front door for his ride home. He stood up from his chair and WALKED to the vehicle with the help of walker. Although I know that the therapy department played the biggest role in getting this patient to that point, that moment to me was everything that nursing is about.
Regardless of what the task is, how long it’s going to take, or how difficult it’s going to be, we as nursing staff are there to help the patients who need us. It’s our job to accept them at their worst/weakest condition and to do everything in our power to either bring them back to their best or to make them comfortable and dignified until they can no longer survive in that condition.
As a typical person, there is a part of me who doesn’t have any problem with getting older. I welcome the Hallmark idea of growing old with my husband, having a large family of children and grandchildren who come over for Sunday dinner every week after church, and doing cliché “old person” things like knitting, playing bingo, and doing crossword puzzles.
And then I go to work. I take care of people as young as 60 years old all the way into their 90’s. I see the 60-year-old who looks like she’s in worse shape than the 94-year-old because she cannot function physically or very well mentally—she drools, she can’t speak, she can’t feed herself, her food is pureed so she doesn’t choke, her main source of transportation is a wheelchair because she can’t walk, she’s incontinent, and she can’t even do something as simple as scratching her nose if she has an itch. I turn the corner and see the 94-year-old walking down the hall without the assistance of even a walker. She’s walking to the dining room for dinner, except she doesn’t know where the dining room is even though it’s right in front of her and she thinks she’s going to her grandmother’s house to bake cookies. She’s rambling something to the effect of “Grandma likes when I help her bake cookies because the elephants can’t come into the bathtub and take them”.
It’s the lives I see when I’m at work that make me dread getting older. I like to think that because I take care of the people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia, that God will never punish me with such a terrible mind and body stealer; that I will be spared of such a horrible experience so that I can live freely to experience those Hallmark moments in my golden years.
The Art of Nursing
As cliché as it sounds, I still believe that nursing is all about “helping people.”
I was seven years old when I first decided what I wanted to be “when I grow up”, and I haven’t changed my mind even once over the last twenty years. My mother was in an extremely serious car accident, and when she was released from the hospital, she and I stayed with my grandparents until she was completely recovered. It was there that I dutifully helped my grandmother change my mother’s positions, clean her up, and change her bandages every single day. In the niaveness that only a young child can possess, I truly thought that I was solely responsible for her progress; and although I was saddened by her injuries, by the end of her recovery period, I had decided that I wanted to be a nurse.
One of my first patients as an STNA was a 36 year old male who had been completely paralyzed from the shoulders down from a motorcycle accident. When he first entered my facility, he was a complete-care patient, requiring a Hoyer lift to transfer him and a very minimum of two staff members to assist with any type of care. He was at the facility for a full three months. On the day he was discharged, I wheeled him to the front door for his ride home. He stood up from his chair and WALKED to the vehicle with the help of walker. Although I know that the therapy department played the biggest role in getting this patient to that point, that moment to me was everything that nursing is about.
Regardless of what the task is, how long it’s going to take, or how difficult it’s going to be, we as nursing staff are there to help the patients who need us. It’s our job to accept them at their worst/weakest condition and to do everything in our power to either bring them back to their best or to make them comfortable and dignified until they can no longer survive in that condition.
As a typical person, there is a part of me who doesn’t have any problem with getting older. I welcome the Hallmark idea of growing old with my husband, having a large family of children and grandchildren who come over for Sunday dinner every week after church, and doing cliché “old person” things like knitting, playing bingo, and doing crossword puzzles.
And then I go to work. I take care of people as young as 60 years old all the way into their 90’s. I see the 60-year-old who looks like she’s in worse shape than the 94-year-old because she cannot function physically or very well mentally—she drools, she can’t speak, she can’t feed herself, her food is pureed so she doesn’t choke, her main source of transportation is a wheelchair because she can’t walk, she’s incontinent, and she can’t even do something as simple as scratching her nose if she has an itch. I turn the corner and see the 94-year-old walking down the hall without the assistance of even a walker. She’s walking to the dining room for dinner, except she doesn’t know where the dining room is even though it’s right in front of her and she thinks she’s going to her grandmother’s house to bake cookies. She’s rambling something to the effect of “Grandma likes when I help her bake cookies because the elephants can’t come into the bathtub and take them”.
It’s the lives I see when I’m at work that make me dread getting older. I like to think that because I take care of the people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia, that God will never punish me with such a terrible mind and body stealer; that I will be spared of such a horrible experience so that I can live freely to experience those Hallmark moments in my golden years.
No comments:
Post a Comment