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| Nurses
say the perspective of being the patient makes them
better nurses when they revert back to their scrubs. |
Kara Battaglino was having a rotten December.
She'd recently recovered from a mysterious six-month
bout of muscle fatigue and soreness when she suffered
a relapse of symptoms. Her doctors diagnosed the problem
as an autoimmune disease, myasthenia gravis, and removed
her thyroid gland in a surgery at University Hospital
in Syracuse, N.Y.
Lying in her recovery hospital bed, the 31-year-old
registered nurse had time to reflect on her postoperative
pain, the extensive follow-up treatments she would need
and that she'd have to take yet another leave from her
job as a cardiac ICU nurse.
Battaglino ignored her own preoccupations, though,
to focus elsewhere: her suffering bunkmate.
"She had a hip replacement … and was in
a lot of pain and discomfort," Battaglino said.
"So I would get out of bed, grab my IV pole and
help her out with whatever it was that she needed help
with."
Helping her to the restroom, getting a blanket or
clearing a food tray-it was all in a day's work for
Battaglino, even though she was as off-the-clock as
a nurse can get.
Battaglino, who was among several nurses who shared
with NURSEWEEK their experiences as patients, agreed
that being on the other side of the needle was not a
comfortable position. Most are wired for tending and
providing, not being pitied and pampered. That they
might be sick, injured or pregnant usually fails to
readjust that perspective during treatment, several
nurses said.
"That's a whole different role for most nurses,"
said Heidi Benoit, MSN, a Louisiana nurse educator who
was hospitalized last year for an inguinal hernia.
The nurses agreed that the viewpoint of a nurse-turned-patient
is different from that of the typical patient. A nurse
may know many of the details about his or her condition,
which can mean either added reassurance or a greater
understanding of the risks. Bedridden nurses might be
more cooperative and compliant with their bedside nurses,
but they also can be unintentionally intimidating to
staff members who fear appearing incompetent to a peer.
Most of all, nurses said the perspective of being the
patient makes them better nurses when they revert back
to their scrubs. They learn how to better read patient
distress and realize how crucial empathy plays in a
patient's recovery.
Benoit is a nurse who should be accustomed to the bedridden
patient role. She endured several facial reconstructive
operations throughout the past two decades following
a 1979 auto accident in which she was thrown through
a windshield. She had a second operation last year to
have a floating, microscopic glass shard from that long-ago
accident removed from an eye socket. Even with multiple
hospitalizations, she admitted that she's never grown
accustomed to the patient role.
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