A labor of care
When I read that two kinds of patients are frustrating — those who are confused and those who are difficult to please — and that both deserve treatment that is caring and professional, I knew I would like the weblog about a nurse and the woman behind it.
The woman is not a hospital administrator who makes facile policy statements about patient care. The woman is a registered nurse named May who came from the Philippines a few years ago to work in a California hospital. And she works — 12-hour shifts, frequently short-staffed, rarely short-tempered.
Unlike many bloggers, May does not question her world as much as she questions herself. And we learn a lot about caring for sick people through her thoughts.
An example of a confused patient: “I want to get out of here because the fire is getting closer and and the fu#*ing priests are coming.”
An example of a patient difficult to please: “I am going out for a smoke and nobody can stop me! I cannot just sit here all day and wait for the fu#*ing (certified nursing assistant) to take me downstairs. Just watch.”
That is the difference, and every nurse knows that. Only the heartless will accuse or treat a real confused patient with disgust and hostility. And only those who are unprofessional will treat the difficult-to-please patients with rudeness and contempt. Those who listen to their hearts treat the confused patients with respect and compassion. At the same time, those who are difficult to please, they treat with skillful professionalism. (June 5)
May doesn’t always succeed in fulfilling her expectations of herself. For example, an April 30 entry about a dying AIDS patient whose anger at life wouldn’t let her make his remaining days a little better — arguing, refusing to cooperate, complaining about everything, insulting her, day after day:
He has every right to be angry, I told myself . . . (but) should I just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, he wants to be miserable, that’s his choice, not mine’ . . . I don’t know. I just know that’s what I (eventually) did. At that time, nothing else felt more appropriate. I rationalized over and over that I was only giving him what he was asking for, and that it was right. Yet . . . why does everything feel so wrong? Maybe because it is. Maybe because being coldhearted is always wrong. And I was coldhearted, and I was wrong.
May is a familiar person to me. Over the years, I’ve known a number of doctors and nurses on a personal basis, and it seems that it’s mostly the nurses who are always questioning themselves. Or maybe they’re just more willing to express their self-doubts publicly. I don’t know. I just know that reading May’s weblog from its beginnings in April 2005 brought back a lot of familiar faces to me.
I should note that many of May’s entries are long, and all are written in a lower-case, stream-of-consciousness style that occasionally mixes verb tenses, but it is still easy reading. And good reading, which is why her weblog is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.
I found about a nurse on the blogroll of a site suggested by a reader and fellow blogger, Gwen. Her recommendation was Tales of a Bohemian Road Nurse, a freewheeling and often funny blog about a home health nurse who tools around rural Texas in a Jeep. Gwen’s blog, also excellent, is Small Scars, a chronicle of knitting, reading and home life by a public health nurse in the Bay Area of northern California.
By the way, one of the more unusual sites I found on the Bohemian road nurse’s blogroll was Addicted to Medblogs, whose author describes herself as “a bored attorney who spends too much time reading (medical blogs) at work.”
Now there’s a derivative website.
– Sid Leavitt
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