I’m glad laughter is the best medicine. It might be all the health care I can afford.

-bumper sticker

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.

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

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.”

Hindsight is an exact science.

Guy Bellamy

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

Be truthful, gentle, and fearless.

- Gandhi

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!

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.

Self-Portrait. Pencil on paper 2001 by jparadisi

Telling Our Stories to Benefit Others is my latest blog post for TheONC; the online community for oncology care teams. Registering for TheONC is free for oncology nurses.

Having the opportunity to write about creativity and its place in the oncology setting allows me to blog out loud the internal dialogues about painting, writing, and nursing I’ve had ever since I came out of the closet as an artist over a decade ago.  I have found these words of Goethe’s true:

“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”

In my pursuit of living creatively, I frequently find magic in the convergence of science, humanity, and art. For instance, take this passage written by Peter Steinhart:

To draw anything you have to find a connection with it. You have to turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing. You have to let the object stir you to empathy or ennoblement or joy or compassion-even to fear. You must see that things are a part of your world in some special way before you can attend to them.

Now re-read the same passage, with a few simple changes:

To be a nurse, you have to find a connection with people. You have to turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing. You have to let patient care stir you to empathy or ennoblement or joy or compassion-even to fear. You must see that your patients are a part of your world in some special way before you can attend to them.

When making art, or practicing the art of nursing, it all boils down to focus and connection. Whichever you are doing today, find that focus and connection. Someone’s life will be better, because you did.