The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story

by Christie Watson

I was sent to a residential center run by the Spastics Society (now called Scope), earning £20 pocket money a week by looking after adults with severe physical disabilities: helping them to toilet, eat and dress. It was the first time I felt as if I was doing something worthwhile.

I had nothing, but I was happy. And it was the first time I’d been around nurses.

nurses should be sympathetic toward everyone.

Sympathy, compassion, empathy: this is what history tells us makes a good nurse.

recognizing the role of good architecture and hospital design in improving patients’ health.

(all doctors and nurses have mugs and pens in their houses with the name of drugs on them, and for a long time my baby daughter had a favorite teddy bear that wore a T-shirt advertising an antidepressant).

A heart attack is different from a cardiac arrest. A heart attack is caused by atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries—a restriction in blood supply to the tissues, and a shortage of oxygen and glucose needed to keep the tissue alive. A cardiac arrest results from the heart stopping entirely, from any cause.

Oxygen is potentially dangerous in the treatment of heart attacks, as it can constrict already constricted blood vessels.

Nursing requires fluidity, being able to adapt and push energy in the direction where patients and colleagues need you, even if it is unfamiliar.

Alcoholics would come into the hospital and drink the hand-gel to get to its alcohol content.

Nursing is a career that demands a chunk of your soul on a daily basis. The emotional energy needed to care for people at their most vulnerable is not limitless and there have been many days when, like most nurses, I have felt spent, devoid of any further capacity to give. I feel lucky that my family and friends are forgiving.

“You’re not a nuisance at all. That’s what we’re here for.” I smile at her and take her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. MARK TWAIN

I am already in too deep and am too proud to admit that nursing might not be the best option for me after all.

You cannot separate mind and body. We are all souls, housed in flesh.

Aliens could be real. It’s not our job to disprove. We are not here to dispute the possibility of extraterrestrial activity in another galaxy.” She laughs, a short burst of cackling.

We can all get ill, and we probably all will, at some stage. Mental illness is no different from having asthma, or a broken bone. So don’t worry about it.

The earliest psychiatric nurses were known as “soul friends,” each being matched with a patient to develop a therapeutic relationship, based on friendship. This is back in fashion now, with hospitals hiring people who have personal experience of mental illness to work in recovery colleges—centers

“Drugs don’t actually treat disease, in fact they only help with the symptoms. And they are still used to restrain people. We have excellent doctors here, but it’s important to remind them that the patient’s choice is paramount with regard to their medication, and even whether they choose to take it—if they’re not sectioned, that is.

Reflective practice—like all nursing theories—has a number of different models and ideas, but essentially it is the process of making sense of real events.

A friend who suffers from schizophrenia describes it as “seeing the world in fragments. Trying to make things fit together. But of course one size doesn’t fit all, and my experience is completely different from everyone else’s.”

“discharge planning”—a complex multidisciplinary affair in mental-health nursing. “People might have been erratic and violent while ill, before admission; they may have been self-medicating with drugs and alcohol; will almost certainly have employment and money issues to sort out. So sending someone home is complex. They may not have a home anymore, or it may be somewhere that is not suitable.”

there are now 100 million sufferers of mental illness. In an age when we have everything, when our living conditions are better, when our general health and education should be at a universally higher standard, we are suffering as never before.

There is no greater expression of pain than a person who eats so little they may die. Or eats so much they may die. Obesity is self-harm. Addiction is self-harm. We hurt ourselves in different ways to express such emotional pain.

Venus emerging from a seashell on the shore, represents the metaphor—used since classical antiquity—of a seashell as a woman’s vulva. I love that painting. Scarlett’s vulva is nothing like a seashell.

They buy Tarot cards—“midwives used all to be witches”—and tell me my future in the evenings,

Human babies, along with dolphins, otters and some seabirds (including penguins), have a diver’s reflex until they’re six months old. It is the kind of reflex that overrides other reflexes, allowing a baby to stay underwater for longer than usual without drowning. Our connection to nature, our will to survive.

I was not born a nurse, but was made into one by other births. Both joy and tragedy build a nurse.

It is a multitude of experiences that make an expert nurse, but the ability to think deeply about them, and to search for meaning, is what a good nurse is often born with.

I’ve read Florence Nightingale’s Environmental Theory, where she argued that the environment is crucial to a patient’s recovery. She stated that “the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness.”

identified nursing as a healing art: the nurse and patient work together, so that both become mature and knowledgeable in the process.

The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge.

Nursing people means doing for them what they would normally do, when they have no will to do it, until they have will to do it.

Suffering, and even the sensation of pain, can be reduced by kindness.

“Always trust the mother,” she says. “The mother knows her child better than us, better than any consultant in the world. If the mother says something is wrong with her daughter or son, then you believe her. And the other thing to look for, of course, is yawning.”

“Remember, remember, remember,” I tell myself. Nursing requires building immunity to sorrow, but nursing children also requires being silly. Being chucked in a bath full of soup. Making a child laugh. Nursing means recognizing that when there is a large white cloud at the center of her child’s scan, a mother needs something important to hold on to.

The very best thing about being a children’s nurse is that part of my job is cuddling babies.

A work hard, play harder mantra;

“The doctors particularly are a very high suicide risk. They’re so highly stressed and have easy access to everything. And they don’t attempt suicide. They do it.”

He’s having regular caffeine into a nasogastric tube, to ensure that he remembers to breathe. Caffeine is a central respiratory stimulant and is widely used for small babies who suffer from apnea (periods of prolonged breath-holding).

there was a medically-led belief that premature babies did not experience pain.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is of unknown prevalence in the UK, and any prenatal exposure to alcohol is a risk factor. There is no treatment, and the damage to the child’s brain and organs cannot be reversed. It is suggested that children with FASD often get misdiagnosed with conditions such as autism and ADHD. When alcohol passes from the mother into the fetus’s body, the baby lacks oxygen and the nutrients needed for its brain and organs to grow properly.

The function of nursing is similar to the function of the liver, which is in charge of infection control, of wound care—making enzymes and proteins involved in blood clotting and tissue repair—and of nutrition, digesting food to retain goodness. Nurses can’t eliminate toxins as the liver does, but we certainly spend a lot of time trying to change the focus of bad things by introducing hope, comfort and kindness.

if the patient ever sees an experienced nurse looking worried, it means they are likely dead already.

Time is a funny thing. If we are waiting for a relative having an operation, it slows down, until each second becomes a minute, each minute an hour. Yet if we are a patient having an operation, time becomes shorter: we count down from ten, and there is nothing.

There are people, too, who donate a kidney while they are alive, well and simply want to save another life. A level of kindness that I can’t imagine.

15 percent of patients felt their personality had changed following transplantation, even that was attributable to having suffered and survived a life-threatening event, and most other information related to the heart housing—or being linked to—emotion is completely anecdotal.

Nurses do not explicitly search for meaning, but meaning is part and parcel of their day job. Nurses certainly use the language of the heart. They understand and describe patients as broken-hearted. Many nurses have seen it. And the best nursing comes from the heart, and not from the head.

There is a danger of forgetting what nursing is, what it means: the importance of providing care.

Kindness, empathy, compassion and providing dignity. This is what makes a good nurse.