Journal of Nursing Jocularity

Here we are in February, with hearts and flowers everywhere we look. Of course, the images that we’re being bombarded with aren’t anatomically correct, but that’s alright – you can pack more chocolates into the box with the ‘traditional’ design!

And isn’t that what the holiday is all about? Chocolate, in all of the wonderful flavors and shapes and marvelous vending machines that never run out, even in the middle of a shift-that-just-won’t-stop…

Some people are surprised by nurses’ devotion to chocolate.  After all, we’re health care providers.  We’re doing our best to make sure everyone’s fit as a fiddle.  So how can we advocate so strongly for chocolate?

Chocolate is made from cocoa beans.  It’s obviously a vegetable. Vegetables are good for you. Mystery solved!

Of course, February isn’t entirely about romance, or as we call it, chocolate.  It’s also National Heart Month, a celebration of all things cardiac.  Throughout the month, we’ll be sharing great heart humor as we find it, and encourage you to send in your favorite joke about the old ticker.

To get things started, here’s a perennial favorite (and just in time for tax season!)

A new arrival, about to enter hospital, saw two white coated doctors searching through the flower beds.

“No,” replied one of the doctors. “We’re doing a heart transplant for an income-tax inspector and want to find a suitable stone.”

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.

A nurse stays up until midnight because there’s at least six hours until the shift is over!

What will 2011 hold? It’s hard to see from here — those psychic glasses we ordered from a late night infomercial have yet to arrive — but we know some things for sure:

There will be patients who challenge us, who change our lives, and who remind us why we got into nursing in the first place. Sometimes we’ll laugh, sometimes we’ll cry, and always- we have the chance to make a difference in their lives. (more…)

Happy Holidays to One and All! One of our favorite things about the season is how it makes us all look at the world a little differently. Being surrounded by family and friends, planning parties and picking the perfect present, merry music and holiday cheer – for good or for bad, the cumulative effect is surely to change our perspective.

Sometimes this is good.  We find ourselves smiling more, enjoying special times with those we love and looking forward to celebrating every treasured tradition.

Sometimes, this is not so good.  Holidays come loaded heavily with expectations, and many of us try to ‘do it all’ — on top of everything we’re already doing, which can be (for the understatement of the year!) quite a lot.  The pressure can leave us resenting the very times we’re supposed to cherish the most…and that’s before we get to work! (more…)

What’s the most essential resource a nurse has at their disposal?

That’s a hard question to answer.  Sure, we’ve got all this training and medical know how. It’s really pretty hard to make it through the work day without either.

But for many nurses, particularly at this time of year,  a sense of gratitude is nearly as critical.  The nature of what we do, each and every day, gives up plenty of opportunities to say “Thank you!”

Thank you, when the wee baby who’s been gasping for every breath, finds the strength to make it through the night…and the night after that…and the night after that.

Thank you, when the patient who comes in in approximately 235 pieces, leaves the hospital in one (plus a few extra parts, just for good luck!) (more…)

It’s October and that means Halloween — time for all the ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night! But we’re not generally *really* terrified by Halloween’s horrors.  The witching hour is usually met not with howls and shrieks — but with laughter, joy ringing into the night.

Laughter.  It’s always there with us, even when we’re ‘scared’.  It’s easy to laugh when we’re pretending.  Yet it is when we’re not pretending,  when we’re scared for real — when the doc has delivered bad news, or worse, has no news to deliver yet — when we don’t know what is going to happen, or how it’s going to happen, or how we’re going to pay for any of it — that laughter proves its true value. (more…)

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.

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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…)

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…)

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…)

May is, for many nurses, the most wonderful month of the year. After all, this is the month where we celebrate a holiday that not everyone can appreciate — only those of us who have gone through or been close to someone who’s undergone a truly transformational experience; the sort of life journey that makes you really look at who you are, contemplating with shock changes you didn’t even know your body was capable of making.

I’m talking, of course, of National Fungal Infection Awareness Month!  Here at the JNJ headquarters, we’re already decorated and stocked up for the non-stop round of parties that marks this special time of year.  If we knew who’d founded this celebration, we’d absolutely invite him over — he’s likely a fun guy!

Yes, May means mirth and mirth means many things.  Being willing to be surprised by the unexpected, to look at experiences from a different angle, to groan in company at a colleague’s bad puns -  all of these are demonstrations of you being open to the joy and laughs the universe has to offer. (more…)