What Nurses and Doctors Feel

Theresa Brown, BSN, RN, OCN, PhD, is a staff nurse, the author of Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life and Everything in Between, an Opinion Columnist for the New York Times “Bedside,” and a member of the National Advisory Council for the Center for Health Media and Policy.

Danielle Ofri’s new book What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine deserves an award for pulling back the curtain on one of the most taboo topics in health care: difficult feelings. The book is honest and brave, as well as eloquent and compelling. Ofri, a physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, is a talented writer and quite a smart observer of human emotional responses, including her own.

I came to the book as a staff nurse and many of the experiences discussed, as well as the emotional responses they evoked, strongly resonated with me. That’s why I’ve titled this blog post “What Nurses and Doctors Feel,” because even though Ofri’s book focuses on MD’s, nurses can learn a lot from it about our own on-the-job feelings.

 What Doctors Feel begins by exploring how hard it is for Ofri as a new physician to see the humanity in a homeless patient who is dirty, bug infested, and smells terrible. Her feeling of revulsion over the patients’ hygiene makes her unable to care for the patient. Then a nurse’s aide respectfully and gently offers to get the patient cleaned up, locating the human being underneath the patient’s dirty outer layer. Watching the exchange teaches Ofri an important lesson about the barriers to, and importance of, empathy.

LIFT

I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about poverty and people living in poverty.

These ideas are challenged daily this summer as an intern working at LIFT, a national non-profit whose mission is to help community members achieve economic stability and well-being.

After a comprehensive training orientation with skilled teachers, I have the opportunity to work one-on one with clients in LIFT’s Bronx office to secure housing, employment, public benefits, legal services and financial advising.

In 5 short weeks this experience has educated me and raised my awareness about people living in poverty. The people who come to LIFT as clients are not at all lazy. They work hard every day and come to LIFT because they just need help getting back on their feet.

Having lived through the recession, I think we can all relate to changes in economic security – some folks clearly impacted greater than others – but we all shared common feelings of anxiety, nervousness and panic.