Karyn Buxman, Nurse Speaker! Deja You: Dealing With Familiar Faces in Nursing
Read JNJ Publisher Karyn Buxman‘s column Deja You: Dealing With Familiar Faces in Nursing
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Fighting Back With Frivolity!
Laughter may be the best medicine — but that’s not the only thing it is. Humor is a tool, a resource that costs nothing and can be deployed anywhere, 24/7, every day of the year. Humor can be our secret weapon, the tool we use to fight back against feelings of overwhelm, fear, frustration, stress, and more.
Not everyone is familiar with the use of humor. Terminally ill patients often report being told, “If you knew how sick you were, you wouldn’t be laughing right now!” by their family and friends. In fact, it is when we’re truly ill — or when we’re confronted with serious illness in another — that humor becomes so very important.
Posted in: Publisher's Note
Leave a Comment (0) →Sun, Surf, and Smiles
Ah, the dog days of summer. We’re well into a season of heat exhaustion and dehydrated patients — balanced out of course by the crop of over-hydrated patients, who arrive seeking care after some of their more ingenious ETOH-on board plans fail to work out quite as well as expected. The temperature’s rising, supplies are in short supply, and the mood of our colleagues and peers?
It can make all the difference, can’t it? The shift’s going badly, there’s a knife fight brewing in the waiting room, and you’ve got a completely disorientated patient who is sure he’s really named Zamboni walking around without the benefit of a gown, dispensing helpful advice wherever he wanders. You’ve got over 5 hours before you can think about heading home — and your colleague, in the middle of this crazy, stressful shift, does something to make you laugh. A funny face or orders given in a squeaky voice is enough to at least momentarily take the train right off the rails to catastrophe and put the shift back on track: it might not be fun, but you’re going to make it through somehow. (more…)
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Leave a Comment (0) →Let Freedom Ring!!!
Ah, July! The month starts off with a bang as firework displays illuminate Independence Day from coast to coast — a great show if you’re not working the night shift.
Of course, if you are working the night shift on the Fourth of July, you’re not going to miss out on all the fun. As a nurse, you know you’re in for a few explosions of your own: It’s almost guaranteed that the patient in bed 4 will power poop and projectile vomit at the same time. Fountains of festivity indeed, especially if they’ve eaten some patriotic colored goodies a few hours previously…in fact, if you find yourself collecting red, white and blue stool samples, be a sport, shut off the O2, and hand that guy a sparkler! (more…)
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Leave a Comment (0) →June Jocularity
School’s out for summer…or it will be soon! And we know what that means. Young people with free time on their hands means interesting times in the emergency room — and Very Long night shifts for those of us who have teenagers left to entertain themselves while we’re working. Finding life/work balance is always a stress, but I think summer puts it front and center. Everyone wants *us* — to go to the beach, to attend family functions, to host the parties and man the bbq, all the while being the best nurses we can possibly be.
No problem, right? We can do it all. All nurses possess superior multi-tasking abilities that allow us to compile shopping lists in our head while we’re passing meds and giving report: on the way home from our double, we can just pop into the store, pick up two carts full of groceries, come home to our magazine-perfect houses, call up all of our charming friends, and have a lovely impromptu summer get together with exquisitely catered food that we whipped up ourselves while waiting for our guests to arrive. After the festivities, we retire for a blissfully romantic evening with our partner, awaking after a perfect night’s sleep to do it all over again… (more…)
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