TheONC.org: Resources and More for Oncology Nurses

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Untitled. by jparadisi 2012

By now, readers know I blog weekly for TheONC. This week I write about dual identities as nurse and artist/writer in Curbside Consultation. My colleagues, employer, and frequent patients know about my art and blogging activity. Sometimes worlds collide.

The Oncology Nurse Community (TheONC.org) is a new online social forum for oncology nurses and cancer care teams where they can leverage their collective knowledge, nurture professional growth and emotionally support each other in a secure environment, as registration is required.

Moderated by oncology nurses and key opinion leaders, TheONC features discussions and commentary covering key issues ranging from symptom management and palliative care to managing ethnic and cultural diversity.

Other resources in the community include:

  • A Library of resources including patient education materials and presentations by community members
  • Clinic Close-Up, where members can view video-based interviews with experts from large group practices, private practices, and academia covering a variety of topics
  • News items relevant to clinical practice
  • An interactive Quiz feature where nurses can test their diagnostic knowledge on a regular basis
  • A Calendar of national and regional events and meetings specific for oncology nurses and cancer support team members

TheONC is like having a weekly national oncology conference conveniently online. A wide range of topics have already been discussed, including Stem Cell Transplant, pediatric oncology, survivorship, nursing while going through cancer treatment, and much more. Once you’ve registered, posts can be saved for future reference.

Follow TheONC on Twitter @The-ONC, and Like us on Facebook.

New This Week at TheONC & at Scrubs Magazine

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This week for TheONC I blog about nurses helping patients stuck at anger in their grief process. These nonviolent patients are difficult to bond with because the anger is often expressed as dissatisfaction with their caregivers, sometimes disruptive of work flow.  Staying engaged in their care is challenging, but not impossible.

TheONC is an online community for oncology nurses and care teams. Join the conversation. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @The_ONC.

Yes, that’s me talking about my fear of “big, hairy adult patients” while transitioning from pediatric intensive care nurse to adult oncology nurse in Theresa Brown RN’s article, Field of Dreams published in the summer 2012 issue of Scrubs Magazine. (By the way, I found I enjoy adult patients more than I ever expected!) Theresa interviewed several nurses about how they arrived in their specialties. She explains her own journey too. Scrubs is available at uniform stores, and by subscription.

I Wish I’d Said It

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Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like-then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

-Jean Cocteau

Bringing Beauty and Creativity to Nursing Practice

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Note: A reader emailed a request I write about bringing beauty and creativity to nursing practice. Here goes…

Nurse as Sisyphus by jparadisi 2012

Nurse as Sisyphus by jparadisi 2012

Finding beauty and creativity in our daily lives is vital for happiness. Art is a path along which the breadcrumbs leading us to both are found. This statement seems pretentious in a society cutting the study of art (music, dance, literature, painting, and drawing) from its educational system, regarding it no more necessary than so much fat sucked away through liposuction. Access to art is also eroding: on a recent trip, my husband and I paid $15 each for admittance to an art museum. Without funding, art, like health care, may soon be accessible to a decreasing number of people.

Art is essential in bringing beauty and creativity to nursing practice because it provides the humanitarian tools needed to find self-worth in a job that is complex, and often overwhelming, with waves of life and death crashing over our heads. It’s easier to empty a bedpan if you consider Prometheus and his love of humanity while you clean. For other nursing tasks, the punishment of futility dealt to Sisyphus perhaps comes to mind more often. The longevity of Shakespeare’s plays speaks to their grasp of human psychology and motivation.

Art and literature provide archetypes we can apply to our modern lives.  Excluding the arts from a life science curriculum leaves us searching for meaning without a compass. The ability to apply meaningful ideas from art and literature to our daily lives promotes sustainable happiness.

Connecting patient care to images from art and literature fuels my writing and painting. It protects me from burnout. I credit it with the fact I still love being a nurse twenty-five years after becoming one. In the words of James M. Barrie,

“It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.”

Gate Keepers: This Week’s Post for TheONC

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In oncology, nurses are often faced with hanging chemotherapy, assisting with surgeries, or radiation treatments for grim diagnoses most likely to result in death anyway. Sometimes we wonder why treatment is offered. This week for TheONC, I ask these questions from nursing and artist perspectives in the post Gate Keepers.

TheONC is an online community for oncology professionals. Follow us on Twitter @The-ONC, and Like us on Facebook.

Nurses Week: New Posts For TheONC

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From Cradle to Grave: The Color White, Charcoal, ink, watercolor on paper by jparadisi

Whether you’re an aspiring artist, writer, or cancer patient, support groups can offer encouragement and resources to help you on the journey. This week at TheONC, I write about unexpected pitfalls of support groups, and how to spot a healthy one in my post Support Groups: In Sickness and In Health.

Last week, TheONC posted my blog, Controlling Our Own Image. Identity is a theme I work with often both in paint, and words. I have some strong thoughts that it’s time nurses create the image we want the media to portray. The post received a flurry of well thought out comments. If you’re not a writer or artist, it’s worth thinking about how you can improve the image of nursing in your own practice.

TheONC is an online community for oncology health care providers to share information and resources. Follow us on Twitter @The_ONC and Like us on Facebook.

Happy Nurses Week!

Diplomacy, Apologies and Boneheads

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Bone Head watercolor and charcoal 2012 by jparadisi

Diplomacy is as necessary to successful nursing as IV skills, medication administration accuracy, and critical thinking. In fact, diplomacy is a subheading of critical thinking. Further, apology is a subcategory of diplomacy. During a recent shift at the infusion clinic, I had plenty of opportunity to practice both.

Nurses are well familiar with these shifts: They start looking like a doable workload. Then nothing goes as planned and you and your coworkers spend the entire shift chasing after it like a pack of grey hounds trailing behind a rabbit on a track. Unexpectedly, the rabbit jumps the track: Medications are not delivered on time from pharmacy. The patient needing a nurse inserted PICC is vein-less, requiring radiology placement and transport to their department; this delays the patient’s antibiotic treatment. The home infusion company is late delivering the continuous chemotherapy infusion for another patient left twiddling his thumbs waiting. IV pump alarms ring longer than anyone can bear, and nothing is on time per the electronic medical record. Meanwhile, the phones never stop ringing! 

These factors cost patients lengthy waits. During such shifts, I say, “I’m sorry” to patients all day long. For the sake of diplomacy, I can’t explain the bonehead roadblocks I’ve endured while trying to move their day forward as efficiently as possible. Diplomacy also prevents me from telling the bonehead roadblock he or she is a bonehead roadblock. I remind myself everyone, including me, makes mistakes, and to show a little love to the bonehead on the other end of the phone, because my turn will come.

My last patient of this shift doesn’t understand my explanation of why her care is delayed. Her sister eyes me suspiciously from a chair. I know she thinks I’m the bonehead. I stay the course, however, and it all works out. The patient eventually received safe treatment.

At the end of these shifts, it’s the outcome that matters. No one really cares who’s the bonehead.