The Joy of Nursing Reclaiming Our Nobility - Hardcover

Adams, Juliana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0997200324 ISBN 13: 9780997200324

Publisher: Steamboat Springs Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

You know when you've had a great nurse ... you can feel it!

Juliana Adams has lived her dream of being a nurse for 50 years. Her stories are stunning and startling; raw and revealing; heart wrenching and heart soaring. In her eye-opening experiences, she provides a deeper perspective ... to always look beyond the diagnosis ... because every nurse is more than just a nurse!

The Joy of Nursing: Reclaiming Our Nobility is provocative and riveting as the stories from new nurse to intuitive experienced nurse unfold. Far more than a memoir it is a rich journey from novice to expert, a concept with historical roots for all who enter this profession.
-Are you a nurse or exploring nursing as a career?
-Are you wondering what is true about being a nurse?
-Does your nursing reality match the dream you once envisioned?

For the currently practicing nurse, The Joy of Nursing will resonate with you. What Juliana learned about herself and her profession created a foundation of practicing nursing that resulted in a far deeper sense of joy.

The Joy of Nursing will give you hope.

For those who feel the call to become a nurse, you will see yourself in Juliana's innocence and desire to be the best nurse possible. This is a beautiful place to begin your life as a nurse ... and to carry with you throughout your career. Nurses have the knowledge, tenacity and creativity to ensure that the continued sacredness of the nurse-patient relationship endures.

The Joy of Nursing will inspire you to live your nursing dream.

With courage, insight and optimism, Juliana Adams reveals the challenges and barriers that face the profession. To be a nurse is an honor.

She shares stories, her insights, and her dedication to nursing are exactly what the overwhelmed, disillusioned, innocent and anyone entering nursing need.

Within The Joy of Nursing: Reclaiming Our Nobility, you will learn:
If you are a practicing nurse, you will rejoice and rediscover your joy of and in nursing.
If you feel the call to be a nurse, you will be encouraged to become part of this exciting profession.
If you are disenchanted, you will uncover novel approaches for feeling valued and reconnected to the organization.
If you know someone in nursing, you will celebrate their dedication to the patients and families they care for.

Get ready to rekindle the nursing spirit that is the essence of healing care for both patient and self. Discover Juliana Adams Camelot Nursing!

About this title

From the Author

Juliana Adams, BSN, MSN, MA is dedicated to the advancement of the nursing profession and is actively engaged in how nursing care is delivered. She is an author, speaker and film maker.

In 2012 she produced the film Exposure, Reclaiming the Nobility of Nursing. This film led her to seek a greater understanding of the concept of nobility within nursing. What began as a metaphor of her own exposure to life and nursing, led her to write The Joy of Nursing: Reclaiming Our Nobility. 

Juliana has experienced many diverse environments; having worked in ICU’s, ER’s, Ambulatory Care, research, nursing leadership and as an entrepreneur. All contributed to her global perspective of nursing. She is an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor who marvels at how her students, similar to the many patients she has cared for, enrich her life. 

Juliana personally believes that if everyone supported one person that needed assistance, it would result in having individual and societal needs met on a level that would far exceed our expectations. The gift of one’s self sows the seeds for all of humanity to heal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FORWARD

Juliana Adams’ The Joy of Nursing touched my

heart and soul, stirring up embedded memories

of what nursing is, and should be. If it wasn’t for a

nurse, one Sylvia Eaton RN, my three children would

have been orphaned at the ages of 10, 12 and 13 in April of 1976.

Being told by my regular physician that it was “just monthly

female issues” that would go away and to “just go back to work;”

and then being told by another doctor that I really didn’t need

to see anyone else and was “wasting my time asking for another

appointment,” didn’t feel right. I wasn’t a medical doctor; I

believed them. The appointment I had made with “yet another

doctor” was cancelled by me when my doctor told me my pain

could be because of kidney stones and he would schedule tests

the following week. My gnawing lower belly pain persisted.

My pain resonated with RN Sylvia Eaton. She called me

back an hour after I had cancelled my slated appointment.

She recited what I had said my complaints were, pushing me to

reschedule―as in get to her doctor’s office that day. I heard her;

my head heard her and my body told me, “Leave work now and

meet this new doctor.”

Two hours later, I sat across from him, telling him my

story. He was alarmed and alert as he told me that I needed

emergency surgery. She remained by my side till I was

transferred to the hospital.

Days turned into weeks. The toxicity in my body from

the Dalkon Shield IUD created an epic battlefield for a team of

surgeons who had to deal with a ruptured colon and bladder.

I arrested while in surgery and did not leave the hospital until a

month later. I had more tubes and gadgets attached to my body

than I could imagine, and I was angry at not being listened to

until Sylvia looked at me and listened to me. Because of her,

I had gone in to be seen instead of giving up.

My recovery took many months. The unhooking and

removal of all the gizmos and gadgets was welcomed by my body.

· If it hadn’t been for Sylvia Eaton’s nursing experience,

her intuitiveness, her unexpected follow-up―let’s say

outright hounding―and yes, her caring ... I wouldn’t be

alive today.

· If it hadn’t been for her nobility―the character, dignity,

goodness and courage to speak up and out, to take charge

with someone that she had only connected with via the

telephone, and again when I came in to be seen ...

I wouldn’t be alive today.

Nurses have saved patients lives for many years in our

hospitals, clinics, offices, in home care, over the phone and

increasingly now by advancing and advocating for innovative

and new ways to promote health and caring. They are our

guardian angels―sometimes very visibly; sometimes “just

there” with their eyes and ears.

Little did I know that I would dedicate 20 years of my

life as an expert in toxic behaviors in the health care industry

years later. My experience as a patient seeded multiple national

studies and the publishing of several books dealing with conflict

in the workplace.

Within The Joy of Nursing, Reclaiming Our Nobility you will

meet one of those guardian angels, Juliana Adams. Her stories,

her insights, and her dedication to nursing spanning 50 years

are exactly what exhausted, overwhelmed, disillusioned, naïve

and those entering nursing need today. Some of her stories, the

situations she reveals and insights that only decades can deliver,

will break your heart; some will alarm you; and some will have

you standing and cheering. Juliana is an RN, a “real nurse,” whose

candid revealing will make you feel safer and more cared for.

She relates exciting “Camelot” experiences and those that

were not. What she learned at the toughest of places provided

her with the desire to seek a deeper understanding of what being

a nurse was all about. Discovering where the nobility of nursing

came from was inspiring to me, a non nurse. To those nurses

presently working, it will be revitalizing.

Nursing, and its nobility, is at the core of a healthy and

vibrant health care system. The Joy of Nursing will rekindle the

nursing spirit that is the essence of healing care. We all should

thank those who enter its doors and remind those they work for

how vital they are.

―Judith Briles, DBA, MBA

Stabotage: How to Deal with the Pit Bulls,

Skunks, Snakes, Scorpions and Slugs

in the Health Care Workplace

(Judith Briles, DBA, MBA)|

Preface

“I’m your nurse today,

and I will be here for you to make things better.”

I didn’t start out saying this to patients in my early

years. All new nurses, from before my time in the

1960s, to the present, travel along a similar path of

feeling overwhelmed until their education, skills and nursing

acumen does become who they are.

My fifty-year nursing career began with dreams based on

very little reality, but I did become a “real nurse.” By my tenth

year or so, my “expert years” began. These years revealed to

me that there was more to the nurse/patient relationship

than the care that I gave to patients. I realized that there were

more similarities to the reasons why and who decided to become

a nurse throughout the last five decades, than there were

differences.

What has and what has not changed since Florence

Nightingale’s time for the women and men that feel called

to be nurses?

No one wants to be a patient, but few of us live life without

having to, at some time, find ourselves needing the “kindness of

an intimate stranger:” a nurse. Finding my own “roadmap of

being,” desiring to discover my own sacred story of transformations

through the years, took place to some degree, in every position I

have held as a nurse.

I never felt like I had done it all, even as the years went by.

ICUs, ERs, Community Health, Ambulatory Care, starting a

home care business for seniors, interwoven with positions in

leadership, academia and research―in private and for-profit

organizations that were small, big, magnet, unionized and

struggling environments both in Europe and America―were all

part of my curriculum vitae. I experienced “Camelot Nursing.”

I experienced environments, positions and people that educated,

inspired and broadened my understanding of what nurses could

do. I was never “just a nurse.” Not all my positions were easy but

going to work was never a drudge; I believed that I made

a difference. For the first 25 years I was not concerned with

perceptions of nursing or proving my value. As more layers of

staff were added, and held the title of “nurse,” what to expect

from a nurse was confusing.

As I look back, it makes me smile as I think of events that

exceeded anything that I could have imagined. The colorful

stories are pieces of my shimmery mosaic life that has never

been dull. Leah Curtain, a Grand Dame within nursing for the

last sixty years, invites nurses to make the conscious choice of

being “present” with patients, by bringing an attitude of “healing

mental energy.”

Any given moment―no matter how casual, how

ordinary―is poised, full of gaping life.― Anne Michaels

To do something for fifty years―what did I learn along

the way?

Exposure to toughness but holding on to being gentle and

compassionate is a familiar dilemma for most nurses at some

point in their careers. Nurses are “comfortable being uncomfortable”

my nurse friend Marion told me two decades ago.

This discomfort, this frustration occurs more often in regards

to the environment where nursing is practiced than in regards

to the care nurses deliver with their peers. The profession of

nursing is strong enough for us all to nudge, poke and prod it.

Inviting dialogues of discontent is valuable, necessary and

has to be respected and available to all of us to participate in.

This ensures that academia, leadership and the hands-on nurses’

perspective create solutions that work for all of us.

Nobility is a word that you don’t hear that often today

in regards to many professions. Corny, excessive, idealistic

or hyperbole might come to mind. Nursing has ranked as the

“most trusted profession” in diverse surveys of the public’s

perception on trust and respect, but how does this fit with

what else you’ve heard or personally experienced as a nurse,

non-nurse or patient?

I would expect a Boomer and a Millennial nurse to

have differences of opinions, and yet bonding between the

four generations of nurses currently practicing today is

less of an issue than our mutual concerns with those that

employ us.

Historically, the purpose of a Preface is to “explain, apologize

or to defend” the ideas that were to follow in the book. I could

not have written The Joy of Nursing, Reclaiming Our Nobility if

I had not experienced the complex, non-ideal work environment

of the last decade. Reclaiming the carative art and joy of nursing

did occur and provided me with closure, resulting in the confidence

that my nursing experience was not singular to me alone.

Sharing “uncomfortable truths instead of obscuring them allows

that beneath shiny surfaces, there lies a different type of beauty.”

Much of what nurses do remains unclear to those outside

of the profession. The depth, diversity and richness I present

is through the eyes of a young “Blue Angel” volunteer to the

present, spanning fifty years of practice. This book was written

from the perspective of narrative-cultural knowledge. It is

intended for those considering becoming a nurse and nurses

presently practicing who may have become disillusioned along

the way. Rediscovering the joy of being a nurse occurred paradoxically

at a time in my career that I considered the job I was in, to

be the least satisfying.

(Juliana Adams)

Edition details

• Publisher: Steamboat Springs Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0997200324
• ISBN 13: 9780997200324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256