Category: Self-Care

With Nurses Week and Nurses Month coming up, what in the world do we get our nurse friends, colleagues and family members to commemorate the occasion? According to Gary Chapman in his book 5 Love Languages, there are 5 love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, gifts and physical touch.  Nurses can be any of these love […]

The number of nurses in acute care is dropping as they are leaving the profession in droves. It is scary to think that we’ve had a nurse shortage even before the CV-19 pandemic erupted but we now are seeing nurses walking away from their careers in even larger numbers.  Today’s nurses have never faced such devastation, disease, and death in […]

Every morning I wake up feeling like I am in a dream.  My life as I had known it is now completely different and I can no longer do most of the things I used to enjoy doing. I can’t imagine what it must be like for nurses on the front lines to go to work every day to take […]

Whether or not we are on the front lines, many are experiencing what used to be called “shell shock” or “combat fatigue.”  The American Psychological Association calls it post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) “that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, rape or other violent […]

The COVID-19 Global Pandemic has everyone, including Nurses, fearful. I want you to remember that it is ok to feel the fear and that you can manage your mind to manage the fear. I am creating a video series “COVID-19 Survival Guide for Nurses and Health Care Practitioners”, as a way to say Thank You and provide you with tools […]

I recently finished an 8-week class on mindfulness-based stress reduction.  I chose to take the class because my sister had attended it and came out like a different person.  She is much more relaxed and focused in her life. The purpose of mindfulness based stress reduction is to be mindful in everything that we do.  Including eating!  There were formal […]

Surely this can’t be happening to me.  I love what I do.  Yet the signs were so insidious and I thought, as most nurses do, that I could do it all.  In the beginning, I stopped doing yoga, then meditation and then eating properly.  My self-care went down the drain.  I was irritable with my children and frustrated with myself.  […]

A study was released last year that found nurses are 23% more likely to take their own lives than the general population.  Adding to that shocking statistic is that nurses are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than people working outside of the medical field.  This is all so tragic and sad. Nurses have access to lethal medications, which […]

I previously have written that in Texas nurses filed a complaint for not being paid for breaks that they were unable to take and how some hospitals use break or lunch nurses to fill in so that the others can take a break.  Click HERE The St. Charles Health System in Oregon utilizes the “buddy system.”  They require nurses to […]

  A completely unscientific review of the nurses who I have represented for licensing issues shows that the vast majority of them worked the night shift. The areas where some nurses seem to get in trouble are: (1)    sleeping on the job – because they haven’t adjusted to the night shift schedule; (2)    taking Ambien for sleep during the day […]