Fun things first. In honor of this third anniversary, I'm giving away one copy of Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor's Journey of Faith and Self. All you have to do to qualify for a drawing is make a comment on this post. On Wednesday, September 25, I will randomly select one winner, contact that winner …
Continue reading Caring Lessons Celebrates Third Anniversary
Last week I praised my internist’s therapeutic communication skills and promised I’d write about some bad experiences soon that I’ve had during my nearly 15-year history of fibromyalgia. So today is the time to give you one example that still floors me years later.Some back story. When I taught nursing, therapeutic communication was my favorite …
Continue reading How is your doctor’s nonverbal communication?
“Don’t let it happen again,” said Marianna Crane, my nurse practitioner friend. I could hear the disbelief in her voice. Marianna and I share a history of graduating from diploma schools of nursing in the early sixties. At that time, a visible hierarchy existed in health care. Doctors were treated like gods. And, even though Marianna …
Continue reading Therapeutic Communication Skills – An Essential in Health Care
If you have a loved one living with either one of these illnesses and would like to understand them better, then Ka Hancock’s Dancing on Broken Glass is a compelling, informative read. Hancock, as a nurse in the clinical specialty of psychiatry, dives into the minds of Mickey and Lucy as they forge a life …
Continue reading Living with Bipolar Illness or Breast Cancer
Last week I read an article about “patient activation” with some amusement. Activation sounded like batteries. Did patients need a couple of Triple As inserted into the soles of their feet to get involved in their own health care? The article defined patient activation as “understanding one’s own role in the care process and having …
Continue reading Patient Activation – Nostalgia for Dorothea Orem!
As she lay dying from pancreatic cancer, Nurse Martha Keochareon wanted to do more than plan her funeral. So she called her alma mater and offered to become a “case study” for nursing students. She reasoned she could help students learn about the dying process while, at the same time, it would be a way …
As a retired nurse educator, I’m excited about the trend in nursing to prepare nurses at a younger age for research and, particularly, academic careers. As we older nurses like to say, “in my day” as a new diploma grad in 1962, I never thought about a full-time career in academia. In fact, in those …
"If only" runs through my mind as I remember our 50th reunion of a week ago. Twenty-nine of forty classmates (three have died) met at Camp Geneva in Holland, Michigan, from Tuesday afternoon through Thursday morning. Many of us, as proud members of the Blodgett Memorial Hospital School of Nursing Class of 1962, had not …
We buried my nurse-mentor sister on Saturday, and we bury a beloved cousin tomorrow. As I sit at my desk overlooking Chicago's Millennium Park, the trees remind me that fall is a time of changing seasons, when greens turn to red to yellow to brown. And the colors remind me of the changing seasons of …
Write Along with Me 