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Calling All Nurse Writers

Theresa Brown, RN, is an oncology nurse and one of the very few nationally prominent nurse-writers in the areas of nursing and health care.  She on the Center’s Advisory Council and this is her first post as a HealthCetera guest blogger.

Being the “nurse who writes” means I work under a misconception. Although a number of physicians regularly opine on the work they do in books, articles in The New Yorker, and my own home base The New York Times, I’ve never heard the MD-writer combination described as odd or bewildering. However, being an RN-writer is seen as unusual, and my admittedly unusual academic background—I have a PhD in English from the University of Chicago —- contributes to the view that I’m an intellectual oddity among my nursing peers.

But I am not alone in combining nursing and writing. Many nurses will be familiar with Echo Heron’s nursing memoirs and Carol Gino’s The Nurse’s Story. Tilda Shalof, a Canadian ICU nurse, and Patsy Harman, a certified nurse midwife, are both nursing and writing right now, and Harmon’s new novel, The Midwife of Hope River was just released. Saving Lives: Why the Media’s Portrayal of Nursing Puts Us All at Risk, a polemic by Sandy Sommers, RN, MSN, MPH powerfully argues that media stereotypes of nurses dangerously undermine nursing’s professional legitimacy.

These nurses, and I, all write for the same reasons that physicians do: educating the public about how health care works, outlining ways to make health care better, exploring how hard it is to work in a job that often deals with death, or showing what nurses’ clinical work actually involves.

By writing about nursing (or medicine) we learn about the nature of our roles as caregivers and we communicate the importance of that role to readers. In a recent column entitled “Money or Your Life” I wrote for The New York Times, I argued in favor of the Affordable Care Act by telling the story of a patient who wished for a death panel because he had no health insurance and worried that the care he needed to save his life would bankrupt his family. His choice would have been for the government to kill him rather than for his family to become destitute financing his care.

The Waiting Room Opens at the IFC in NYC Sept 26

Investigating a third component to what’s impacting childhood obesity – environmental factors

  [caption id="attachment_5004" align="alignleft" width="150"] photo credit: earthtimes.org[/caption] Although

Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation: Does It Cause Needless Suffering?

The author of this guest post, Mauricio Berrio Orozco, RN, is a graduate student at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Last spring he attended a writing course for graduate nursing students co-taught by Jim Stubenrauch and Joy Jacobson, CHMP senior fellows. Click here for a post about a previous semester’s class.

As a nurse, I have experienced plenty of difficult situations that patients and their families go through during hospitalization. But nothing can compare to the suffering that results from prolonged mechanical ventilation, the long-term placement of a breathing tube that’s needed as a result of conditions such as anoxic brain injury or massive stroke.

By Hfastedge from Wikimedia Commons

Most of my patients are elderly. Many of them are conscious, but a good prognosis is basically impossible. They do not have even the slightest chance of recovering their previous level of functioning. Instead of getting better or at least being stable (normal vital signs, no signs of cardiac or respiratory distress), they develop problems related to mechanical ventilation. For instance, their muscles atrophy from inactivity, which then progresses to severe muscular and joint contractures. In addition, huge pressure ulcers can develop, as can ventilator-associated pneumonia, rapidly making the situation worse. No matter how excellent the care these patients get, their quality of life will only worsen if such complications are present.

Out Loud and In Writing

The following guest post is by Patricia Wagner Dodson, a fiction writer and research nurse at Massey Cancer Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. She recently attended Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses, led by Jim Stubenrauch and Joy Jacobson and co-sponsored by the CHMP and Hunter–Bellevue School of Nursing. Pat blogs at StoryStreams: fiction as comfort.

Storyteller Under Sunny Skies, Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes, Jemez Pueblo, NM

I’m a nurse, I might say.

But I don’t say it. I qualify it. I spin it. I elaborate on it. I never just say it.

I’ve often wondered why.

I used to think it might be because it sounds so ordinary. I imagine that the person I am speaking to might conjure up an image of a woman in white going from room to room, dispensing medications, holding the hands of the dying, recording the responses to treatment, changing IV fluids. I did that for six months when I graduated from nursing school. I was exhausted and miserable, and it nearly sent me back to my old job, the job I had before I became a nurse.