Essays

  During my travels I asked myself several big questions… What was next? What did I want to do in nursing? What did I like about nursing? Most important..did I still want to be a nurse? After seven years at the bedside, from working with both adult and pediatric patients, on med-surg units and in the cardiac intensive care, to performing leadership roles like charge nurse and precepting, I hadn’t quite found my place.   I knew I loved getting to know my patients and their families, building rapport, participating in difficult conversations, and nurse education.  But I felt lost.  The…

Well it’s been almost two years since I published these essays… Looking back, writing and sharing these experiences here allowed me to build a healthier relationship to the CVICU. But time helped, too. The longer I worked there the shock started to wear off.  I developed strong friendships with my coworkers, a better self-care awareness, and a more comprehensive understanding of the heart than I could have ever imagined. I got trained to manage equipment like CRRT (continuous renal replacement therapy) and Ventricular Assist Devices and sometimes worked as the “buffer nurse,” supporting my fellow nurses.  Slowly, I began to…

Through the first few years of my nursing career, I heard whispers of palliative care; the words floated around as recommendations from nurses in report, as something that happened on the cancer care unit, or with my friend’s elderly grandparents. Palliative care, hospice care, comfort care–I interchanged these different stages. That all three of them meant to stop unnecessary treatments and focus on making the patient comfortable. That the end was in sight.   Once, while working in an adult hospital, I paged the palliative care consult physician in distress because the primary medical team was drawing labs, sending blood cultures,…

Knowing I had had a difficult time after Baby K’s death, my nurse manager reached out to me when the hospital’s Schwartz Rounds Committee wanted to have a panel centered around a difficult experience on my unit earlier that year. This months topic was:  Moral Distress in the ICU. When is Enough Enough? They wanted a physician, social worker, and nurse to each present their perspective.  Schwartz Rounds offers a monthly space for healthcare providers to share their experiences and thoughts on difficult moral and ethical topics created from actual patient cases. According to the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare…

Looking back, I realized that Baby K’s death served as a catalyst for everything I had not processed in the CVICU: the codes, compressions, and other children who had passed away in recent months. I had taken care of these dear patients or been familiar with their journey but when I learned of their passing I’d simply feel sad for a second and then get back to work. I never quite processed their deaths. I didn’t where to begin.  I needed to learn how to face the emotional impact of working in this high intensity environment, how to swim in…

Welcome! I’m glad you are here. It’s been a long time goal to share my writing somewhere other than my Google Drive and I’m so excited to finally make it happen.  Growing up, I dreamed about being a writer: filling dozens of  journals until the last satisfying page, writing stories about heroines my age, taking intensive poetry classes in high school. I watched Finding Forester with a notebook in hand to get tips on writing, and even submitted a story for publication when I was twelve years old. (Sadly, A Writer’s Daughter was rejected.)  When it came time to head…