Manicure by Julianna Paradisi 2014
It’s an honor to have my post and illustration, A Brief Meditation on Love, Loss, and Nursing, originally published on Off the Charts, the blog of the American Journal of Nursing, featured in the February issue of AJN
Click on the link above to read the issue online, and find look for Best of the Blog, A Brief Meditation on Love, Loss, and Nursing, in the table of contents.
Drawing From Life is my latest post for Off the Charts, the blog of the American Journal of Nursing. It posted yesterday. Often the lines between art and nursing easily blur, like soft charcoal lines smudged on paper. You might want to check it out, or leave a comment.
The Adventures of Nurse Niki now posts new episodes on Mondays, instead of Thursdays. Be sure to read week’s episode, Moving On..
JParadisiRN readers may know that last year I began writing a monthly blog post for Off the Charts, the blog of the American Journal of Nursing. The latest post, Voice of Dissension: When Nurse Teamwork and Patient Safety Diverge published yesterday. I think it’s worth a read, and even a comment, if I do say so myself. For readers unfamiliar with JParadisiRN, I also made the drawing that accompanies the piece.
Buy Yourself Another One, The Adventures of Nurse Niki Chapter 27, posted today. It’s about the eating habits of nightshift nurses and that special relationship between doctors and nurses.
The Adventures of Nurse Niki is a work of serial fiction. The blog is formatted so the most recent episodes appear at the top. New readers not wanting spoilers of The Adventures of Nurse Niki may begin at Chapter 1 and scroll up from there. Chapters are archived by month (click on the lined square icon on the home page). New chapters post weekly on Thursdays.
Off the Charts has this to say about The Adventures of Nurse Niki:
This blog is made up entirely of first-person episodes told by a fictional nurse named Niki. Each episode is short, detailed, and engaging, and it’s easy to keep up with it on a regular basis, or quickly catch up if you haven’t yet read any episodes. Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor/blog editor
Kevin Ross, aka @InnovativeNurse wrote a review of The Adventures of Nurse Niki, with this highlight:
Julianna has embarked on something special for the nursing community. The Adventures Of Nurse Niki is one of the most intelligent perspectives of life as a nurse. These are the experiences of a “real nurse” if you ask me. Nurse Niki is a smart and dynamic character who works night shift in the PICU at a California hospital. A good television show or fiction novel could certainly draw out the sexiness of working in the ICU, but with Niki’s story we quickly discover that this dynamic character is also struggling to cope with life at the bedside, and as a mother and wife. Hidden within each chapter the discovery is that Nurse Niki is in fact you. She’s me. Well that is of course if I was a woman.
You can interact with Niki on The Adventures of Nurse Niki’s Facebook page. Please don’t forget to “Like” it too. Show Niki some love! Thank YOU!! to the readers following The Adventures of Nurse Niki, the retweets of @NurseNikiAdven (Hashtag #NurseNiki) and those who Like Nurse Niki’s Facebook Fan Page. The support is very much appreciated!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rnfmradio/2013/10/15/julianna-paradisi-nurse-writer-and-artist
At The Pool photo by jparadisi 2013
JParadisiRN is on vacation this week. I’ll write a new post soon from a refreshed perspective. Meanwhile, if you haven’t read my oncology blog for TheONC, or latest post for AJN Off The Charts, this is a good week to catch up.
Cheers!
This morning I’m drinking my first cup of coffee, thumbing through the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Nursing. A familiar sentence catches my eyes in On the Web, page 22. It’s a line from a post published (and I wrote) on their blog Off the Charts. Thanks AJN!
It’s gonna be a good day.
The March 2011 issue of the American Journal of Nursing features my painting Mean Girls (First Communion II). (Click on link, then click on “article as PDF” tab on the right side of the page).
Mean Girls (First Communion II) is part of From Cradle to Grave: The Color White, a series of paintings about the symbolism of the color white in western culture, and in nursing in particular. The entire series of paintings can be viewed on my other blog, Die Krankenschwester.com
From Cradle to Grave: The Color White was exhibited at the Anka Gallery, in Portland, Oregon in October 2010.
Senior editor Sylvia Foley coordinates The Art of Nursing.
photo by jparadisi 2011
A new edition of Change of Shift is posted at Emergiblog. Many thanks to Kim for including my post for AJN’s Off the Charts in the line up. Emergiblog’s Change of Shift consistently publishes the best in nursing and nursing related bloggers.
My readers may want to know that January has been a busy month for JParadisi RN. The American Journal of Nursing blog, Off The Charts published two original posts written by me.
As an artist, writer, and registered nurse, I am constantly checking myself on the material I write, paint, or photograph. While I’m not afraid of a little controversy, I respect my patients and coworkers. First, do no harm. Also, I’m not making enough money writing and painting to afford losing my nursing gig, so it’s all cool. I explore my thoughts on this subject in yesterday’s post, Nurses, Hospitals, and Social Media: It Depends What Business You’re In.
If you don’t regularly read Off The Charts, I encourage you to start. It provides an intelligent, conversational way to keep abreast of the issues facing nurses and health care.
And if you want to read my other January post, follow this link: The Puzzle of Snowflakes (January 4, 2011).
Special thanks to Off The Charts editor, Jacob Molyneux.
Manga (we've made all your favorite foods) photo: jparadisi
Every year, the day after Halloween marks Opening Day of Seasonal Gift-Eating. Nurses, you know what I’m talking about. All over America, nurse lounges abound with gifts of food given to us by patients and doctors offices. Huge canisters of gourmet popcorn, boxes of chocolate, and homemade delicacies arrive and cover all available counter space. Even if there’s no time for a lunch break, there’s always a few seconds to grab a piece of fudge. So it’s a little unfair, in my opinion, that health care is focusing on the issue of obesity, even though I know it’s right.
Many patients, female in particular, cringe when I ask them to step on the scale at their appointments. I don’t say their weight out loud, but simply enter it into their chart. In the December issue of the American Journal of Nursing, Carol Potera reports on the emotional impact on patients of words used to describe their weight in Words Can Hurt. The information comes from a study led by clinical psychologist Gareth Dutton. I found the study’s contrast of words used by physicians versus words used by nurses to describe patient weight enlightening.
Medscape published an article Is “Fat Bias” Making You Ineffective? by Marilyn W. Edmunds PhD, CRNP, in which she calls upon health care providers to reflect upon our biases and how they impact our patients. She also asks us to consider cultural differences in perception of weight.
We’re not the only ones looking and judging, however. Recently at an art opening, another artist told me I am the only nurse he’s ever met who isn’t overweight, and it wasn’t the first time someone has said this to me. I find this public stereotype of nurses more troubling than Dr. Oz’s sexy nurses, who were really women who lost weight, although I agree the entire debacle was in poor taste.
I want to throw one more point into this post. A patient came in raging about fast food chains. I didn’t really get it until he explained that fast food is cheap, so for people living on the limited resources of disability, it is affordable. All the fat, all the sodium, the lack of nutrients from over-processing, is all he can afford. And then he comes in for his appointment and gets lectured on his A1C Hgb results, hypertension, and obesity. In his opinion, there’s no winning for losing.
