Sunday, October 10, 2021

Poetry: Waterproof

 


Oh Darling, How I love you

When you slip beneath the waves,

Curls swaying in the winter surf

Drift and sink, and rise no more.


In days gone by, I would have died

As I tried to pull you to the shore.

The siren song of being a hero

Bashing my head upon the rocks.


How I love you now, as you slide

Into the cool of the Kraken's embrace,

Many-tentacled, silent in the deep

Down where the sunbeams diffuse in tears.


How I want to dive, even now

To pull you by the wrist to the surface spray, 

Grasp you tight, kiss the life into your lips,

Rescue you with my mighty wrath.


Darling, rest easy, I will recall

With Rum and shanties, I will regale:

Tell the tale, how in the gale,

I let you drown to save my soul

10-9-2021

Monday, August 2, 2021

A topic that affects Nursing Education

 


Nurses have long been at the forefront of pandemic education and treatment, dating back to antiquity, nurses heave waded into the field to fearlessly treat the sick when even clergy were afraid to do so. While Florence Nightingale was not the first nurse, her work in the Crimean War is notable for its work in the art of healing as much as for bravery. In 1854, she took 38 volunteer nurses right into the heart of the conflict to care for wounded and dying soldiers. Nightingale was the first to organize the discipline of nursing and to insist upon cleanliness of the healing environment, and started the standardized training of nurses. An expert statistician, Nightingale was able to track which treatments were successful and was able to share her findings, making a huge impact on the survival rates of the soldiers in her care. (Neal-Boylan, 2020) Whenever there is a pandemic, nurses leave the comfort of their homes and families and head right into the danger in their service of others, and many indeed die in the effort themselves. Nurses are repeatedly ranked as trustworthy among the other professions. The purpose of this paper is to explore a current issue that is having an impact upon the profession of nursing. Namely, that of the impact of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic that is still causing new infections and death, despite the availability of vaccines. There is even vaccine hesitancy among some healthcare workers, and this is particularly dismaying as the Delta variant of the virus has started to become the dominant strain responsible for the more recent surge of disease.

Description of the issue

In addition to working hard to care for victims of Covid-19, nurses and other healthcare workers are also having to battle the tidal wave of healthcare misinformation that is like a second plague, spread by social media and causing otherwise thoughtful people to decline a vaccine that has been proven to be safe. This has caused the World Health Organization to declare the anti-vaccine movement to be a grave danger to public health worldwide. The organization ranks this risk as being as dangerous as climate change and threatens to undermine 100 years of using vaccines safely to prevent millions of deaths annually. (Trimble, 2019)

Even as more and more information about the dangers of the highly-virulent Delta variant becomes available, the unvaccinated seem no closer to being part of the solution by getting vaccinated, and indeed seem to take fewer precautions. The lack of concern appears to be unmoved by reports of the danger they are in, and the danger that getting infected would pose to the more vulnerable members of their families and communities. The unvaccinated are also more likely to forego other precautions such as wearing a mask.(Enten, 2021)

History and background of what led up to the issue.

Countless healthcare workers find themselves working long days caring for those infected with Covid-19, and then find themselves going online in their off hours and battling misinformation. Baseless claims spread like wildfire, partly because there is no fact-checking process or peer review to contend with as with scientific findings. It should also be noted that those who would promulgate falsehoods often greet fact-checkers with vitriol and threats of violence. Some doctors report that, while there are protocols and science for dealing with the disease, there are no such protocols for dealing with the endless barrage of memes, pseudoscience YouTube videos posing as factual, and anti-vaccine demonstrators, such as the group that blocked traffic outside Dodger Stadium to temporarily close down access to shots in pandemic-ridden Los Angeles in February. (Chia, 2021)

Healthcare workers across the country have taken to sharing their own personal stories from the front lines of the pandemic, in hopes of combating misinformation, educating about the severity of the illness, and mitigating fears that the public may have about the vaccines.  But promoting vaccines in what has become a highly polarized climate has become risky, as many advocates may find themselves the targets of cyberattacks or literal threats to their physical safety.  The harassment can be unrelenting and may even include criticism from healthcare workers’ own families. Still, advocacy for the public health is not for the faint of heart, but must be undertaken so that patients may get the right information from a professional who cares. (Chia, 2021)

Assessment of the issue from leaders in nursing.

Aside from personal advocacy such as the examples above, nurses also have nursing organizations that undertake the work of making official position statements and lobbying with legislators. Here is an excerpt from a longer statement from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership: "Now more than ever is the time to reflect on nursing’s role in addressing the issues heightened by these events and to inform a progressive path forward where nurses are well-positioned and prepared to meet the evolving needs of our patients, communities and health care system." (American Organization for Nursing Leadership [AONL], 2020)

The AONL and other organizations such as the American Nurses’ Association (ANA) serve the purpose of providing a cohesive voice for Nurses in the United States. Though nurses have been asked, once again, to step into harm’s way to fight this pandemic one patient at a time, nursing organizations serve as the leadership and advocacy arm for the safety of nurses and the patients they serve. They look at the studies, determine best practice in some cases, and often represent the body of nurses at large when communicating with legislators about healthcare policy-making. The AONL advocates for closing healthcare disparities in the minority populations that are often the hardest hit communities in the pandemic.  They also see an opportunity for nursing as a profession to make gains in status and scope within the medical community as a result of the way nurses have stepped up to the challenge of caring for the critically ill during the pandemic. Such gains may be the kind of push needed to push recalcitrant (AONL, 2020)states with restrictive Nurse Practice Acts to allow nurses, especially Advanced Practice Nurse Practitioners, to work within the fullness of their educational ability in the years to come, filling gaps in access to care. This is especially true in smaller and rural communities which may be limited in healthcare offerings.(AONL, 2020)

Personal assessment of the issue and how it affects nursing education

While nursing organizations do not set forth specific mandates for individual nurses to advocate for scientifically sound rejoinders to the current trend of misinformation that is causing such harm to the public good, it is in the interest of healthcare workers to utilize evidence based practice when evaluating interventions for their patients. It should also be noted that in the Nightingale Pledge, the Nursing equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath, nurses promise to “never take or knowingly administer a harmful drug”. (Pedagogy Infusion, 2021)As of the time of this writing, the current Covid-19 vaccines have been determined to be safe and effective.  Given this and the concurring opinions of Health Departments across the country, nurses should feel safe administering the shots for the community and are tacitly expected to take the vaccine themselves, in a gesture of choosing to be a good example to others.

Nursing Faculty are at the forefront of forming these attitudes of generativity in their students. Because the textbooks that contain information about Covid-19 have yet to be written, it is incumbent upon Nurse Educators to keep abreast of the current state of Covid-19 research, such as it is made available, and to integrate pertinent information into their curricula as it unfolds. Nursing Faculty across the country are asked to encourage their students to get vaccinated for their own protection as well as for the public good.

Even Nursing Students are not immune to misinformation campaigns, much to the consternation of the professors that are trying hard to teach the students how to incorporate evidence based practice into the interventions that they design for their patients. In this author’s own classroom, it was found that among the students who have not yet taken the vaccine, there was a persistent rumor that taking the Covid-19 vaccine would cause infertility. Though baseless, the false information instilled enough fear that some of these students will take needless risks to prevent this outcome, for which there is no credible threat. No appeals with facts or assurances of safety would budge this scary idea. Even in this small of a sample among educated science majors, misinformation stands in the way of leading students in practices that would benefit them greatly as they undertake their clinical rotations with high-risk populations. This is to say nothing of the advice such stubbornly ill-informed nurses may give to others who are considering the vaccine.

Recommendations to remedy this issue

It is important to point out that there is big business in misinformation and disinformation. Anti-vaxxer influencers represent 10 billion USD as a result of their efforts to discredit settled science and keep people too afraid to take vaccines, including Covid-19 vaccines. With millions of followers willing to repost fallacious stories on social media, the lies stack up, some layered with partial truths, to the point where sorting out the objective facts becomes impossible. (Sigma, 2021)

Health Literacy is defined as the way that people understand information about health and healthcare. The general population has lower levels of health literacy than nurses do. Nurses really do need to be the “experts”, since they are uniquely poised to share accurate health information with patients and their families.

The importance of giving patients accurate information about healthcare is vitally important. Nurses are trusted professionals and should know better than to be duped by misinformation, but a small percentage may fall prey to it nonetheless. Teaching students how to verify the credibility of research studies that they encounter is one way to demonstrate that true scientific findings are not disseminated via social media and streaming platforms such as YouTube. Learning how to evaluate studies for relevance and veracity is an important skill for any healthcare major to master. Including such instruction in the nursing curriculum is key to creating students who know how to be discerning about the information that they encounter.

Other types of learning that are essential for nursing students are instruction in Critical Thinking and Logical Fallacies. These topics allow students to pierce the veil of the poorly constructed and hyperbole-containing assertions that are common in disinformation efforts whose main goal is to scare people and cause emotional responses. A student who is trained to spot logical fallacies will be less likely to fall for such cheap ploys.

Nurses need to be the adults in the room, and have a cool head when explaining complex disease management and other health information to their patients. Science subjects are not, once subjected to the rigors of actual controlled study, likely to cause histrionic alarm. As nurses, one is required to be a gentle voice of reason, calming the patient’s fears instead of inflaming them with further erroneous information.

As Nursing Faculty, we ourselves need to make sure we are applying the same rigor to the information that we present to our students. Scientific findings may be changed if disproved by better science, and only that. Having this attitude ourselves and not falling for the products of the rumor mill will allow students to find the professorate a trustworthy source of information, as they are learning to form their own conclusions from the available evidence.

Conclusion

Given that a percentage of the United States population is currently being heavily swayed by fallacious information coming at them from multiple sources, it may become a fact of life that nurses have to do their work with critically ill patients, and then also contend with snarky memes that seem to undermine their work. As much as it is a temptation to ignore such slights against our profession as baseless, our communities do look to us for guidance on such matters. As wearisome as it can become to have to swat away such petty annoyances, to not do so is to leave dangerous misinformation unattended in the fertile soil of the public’s collective imagination. Far better to prune such baobabs when small, than to have to attempt a more established tree with roots that run deep with the rot of information that is wielded by unknown parties with an agenda designed to make us mentally weaker and physically sicker.


References

American Organization for Nursing Leadership. (2020). The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nursing Profession in the U.S. AONL. https://www.aonl.org/resources/covid-19/impact-of-covid19-on-nurses

Chia, A. (2021, February 24). ‘If not us, then who?’. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/24/doctor-nurse-online-vaccine-rumors/

Enten, H. (2021, August 1). The data shows the unvaccinated don't fear the virus, even as they are most at risk. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/01/politics/unvaccinated-fear-virus-analysis/index.html

Neal-Boylan, L. (2020, May 11). Nurses on the front lines: A history of heroism from Florence Nightingale to coronavirus. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/nurses-on-the-front-lines-a-history-of-heroism-from-florence-nightingale-to-coronavirus-137369

Pedagogy Infusion. (2021). The Florence Nightingale Pledge. Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.pedagogyeducation.com/Infusion-Campus/Resource-Library/General/Florence-Nightingale-Nurses-Pledge.aspx

Sigma. (2021). Addressing Vaccine Misinformation in Nursing [Presentation]. https://sigma.nursingrepository.org/bitstream/handle/10755/21830/Slides.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

Trimble, M. (2019, January 6). WHO: Anti-Vaccine Movement a Top Threat in 2019. US News. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-01-16/who-names-vaccine-hesitancy-as-top-world-threat-in-2019

Thursday, December 6, 2018

What is the Law?

In the Free and Sovereign Nation of Stacietania, there is but one law: Show Up or Shut Up.

I admit I made that law when I was in deep pain. I had sold myself short for years (decades?) and allowed people to sooth me with words into putting up with less-than-honorable behavior. I don't want to pile on my ex here, because I still coparent with him. But we stopped being good for each other a long time before we divorced. The words turned out to be empty, as words so often are. We live in a world where people do not live with integrity. Weak people say things they don't mean and don't hold themselves to their word.  And we all let them do it because we have all felt that impulse. It is easier to say things than to do things. And so we all live with empty promises and empty threats. And guess what? It leaves us empty.

It hurt me a lot to live that way. I wanted to be in my strength. But as long as I allowed myself to be placed at the low end of the table in people's lives, I did nothing to honor myself. Whether or not I felt I deserved it, I accepted less. I played the concubine, but I wanted to be the queen. My power was drained away from me. In truth I gave it away. It made me bitter. I got angry.

At some point I hit the rock bottom of taking emotional abuse from the world. I set the rule for other people in my life: Show Up or Shut Up. To be around me, people had to be true to their word. Deeds were what I looked at. It was hard, because words are pretty and easy. I had to be willing to cut my circle of trust down to the bone. I broadcast my intention to put up with no bullshit.
Like I said, I thought that rule was just for other people. It was my protection against pain. People who were all talk had less access to me. There would be no acceptance of half-measures. I was a hardass about it. I learned to sharpen and hone the word NO. I used it to cut a lot of people out of my life that didn't have the strength to handle the new me. I chose quality over quantity. It sounds lonely, but it was fine. It helped. I got hurt less. Not to say never, but I had to learn that some of my hurts in life happened because I had permitted them to. I sorta hoped that the people left in my life would follow the law, and that was enough. Not exactly.

Stripping it down further, I realized that I needed to Show Up or Shut Up for myself. Romantic relationships were an Achilles Heel for me. I felt that in a romance I should be able to get my needs met more if I applied the law to people and held them to a high standard. I can see that it wasn't a bad idea, but it was a skilled archer with a good bow but the wrong target. My needs really are not for another person to fill. When someone else wanted me to behave a certain way to make them happy, I balked. That sort of codependent thinking was a trap. I didn't want to be solely responsible for another person's feelings. That didn't feel right. That was a bottomless pit.

I started looking at, and in fact made a list, of the things I thought a relationship would provide me. I could see that I was externalizing my power. There I was, all strong or so I thought, giving away the keys to my inner core. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. When I looked at that list, I started to see that there were some ways I provide those things for myself. For example:


  • I wanted security for myself and my son. 
    • Okay. I went back to school and got a job that would make more money
    • I used some of that money to buy better insurance in case something went wrong.
  • I wanted love and to not be lonely.
    • Guess what? Being married to the wrong person didn't make me feel loved, and in fact was one of the loneliest times in my life.
    • I resolved to spend more time with friends and my son and my pets.
  • I wanted sex
    • Crap. You got me there. I might have to have other people in my life for that.
    • But not always. 
In the end, at the end of my last relationship, I realized I could replace my last boyfriend with a sturdy ladder and a good vibrator. It wasn't worth keeping that person around to get stuff off of the top of the fridge or change a light bulb. The depth of feeling wasn't there for me to continue with him. So I broke it off, because my soul wasn't being nourished by it. 

And he fired back by calling me a Selfish Bitch. Because he knew me enough to know those words would hurt me. 

I figured I would be alone. I was scared, but determined to make a life one way or another. Alone if need be. I wouldn't settle. Working on my Masters' Degree, I focused on the goals above. Make it better, more secure. More friends. More love, less bullshit. I would Show up and Shut up for myself. I would quit bitching and start living in earnest.

Then in the back of my mind I remembered that unique and amazing guy who said to call if I was ever single. He had ideas about what to do about that. So the craziest thing happened. I dropped him a text. I put my heart out on a string in the most vulnerable way possible. That beat up, battered and scarred heart that didn't appear to be worth much to anyone else. Not even to me sometimes. I offered it anyway.

It took him a day and a half to respond, during which time I figured it was just talk. Empty words. And I would soon be dealt-I figured-a crushing ego blow. I had called his bluff and he was going to have to admit that it was just an off the cuff remark and he didn't mean it really. 

Only that is not what happened. 

Turns out he was picking his own heart up, from where it jumped out of his chest and landed from my sudden, unexpected pronouncement.  And there was my heart, offered up. Only he didn't see it as a nearly ruined thing. He cradled it close and laid a healing hand on it. And that thing managed to warm him the way it was never able to even knock the outer layer of frost off of other people. I don't know which of us was more surprised. 

Suddenly, like every person on a journey to enlightenment, I had a giant epiphany. And one of such stunning simplicity. I needed to Show Up for him. What made this real for us both was me shaking my schedule and budget until both bled, and I few across the country. And he was waiting to embrace me. And we made it real. The one law I had created to shield myself from other people applied to me as well. If I wanted to be close to him, I needed to follow it myself.

My heart feels good for the first time in ages. Everyone notices. I am gobsmacked by how happy I am. I'm a delirious lovefool. The world seems to be a little less harsh because I have softened up. I set down that bitterness I was drinking and I feel better. So many different things are happening. I want to show up for the people in my life more now. My friends, my parents, my son. I feel centered and secure. I am slowly daring to feel hopeful. Yes, I give him a lot of credit for being awesome. But I had to allow it, too. 

Show Up or Shut Up is still the law of the Free and Sovereign Nation of Stacietania. It is a just law, that applied to all, brings a lot more peace than I thought. 

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Return From The Dead

I never intended for my blog hiatus to be over two years long. After the gross trolling/stalking experience. I was just going to let things cool down and then resume my writing in this space. It is mine, after all.

Then things got busy. I went back to school. I moved a few times. Trauma. Violence. Eventually some tepid validation and weak sauce justice.

Then Trump got elected. I hid from that version of reality for about one day. Then I knew I needed to use my voice for good, or my version of it anyway. That makes me back in the game of being a general purpose agitator.

So many changes.

Truth is, I can't be me without writing, and the academic papers I have been doing for the last year and a half are not going to satisfy what my muse wants. Let's get real, who knows what kind of bait a muse needs? They are fickle little fuckers. Mine needs me to misbehave, to flood the hotel bathroom with bubble bath, to drink champagne and raise my Kundalini. I need to go Gonzo around at a time in my life that revolves being a single parent with a lot of responsibility.

So, welcome to what is not a rebirth per se, but perhaps a reanimation. I like Zombie imagery. They are a juggernaut. Mere death doesn't stop them.

If my muse shows up, then super yay! But I'm showing up. I intend to have shit to say. Jump in with me. Throw tomatoes if you wanna. All comments will be moderated, and abuse will, as always, be deleted. How about just being respectful of the space?

Subscribe if you wanna. Look back over the archives if you like. Suggest topics if you want to watch me rant.

Thanks for stopping by.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Troll Reminder


This is a public service announcement. This blog is my personal space where I can write the opinions I have about my own corner of the world, from my perspective. I post poetry, restaurant reviews, and other assorted silliness. The content is controlled by me alone.

As such, trolling comments and negativity are not tolerated and will be summarily deleted.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

New Slang: Suit Farm


Just another Stacie-ism:

Suit farm: any restaurant where lawyers and investment bankers congregate in large groups.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

The Fundimental Unfairness of Addiction

God, this is awful. Horrible that this exists. Some of the logic I just can't grasp or totally endorse. But so beautifully and painfully written. As the adult child of an alcoholic/substance abuser, I find my empathy strained. I have been hurt. I have been neglected and abused so that my father could use, so that he could serve the unholy twin gods of whiskey and cocaine. I have my challenges in life, but I have never been reduced to helplessness, and for that I am grateful. Truthfully, I want someone to blame.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand-life-without-drugs

Some artists have to contend with this unending misery in order to create. And then some get swallowed by it. My own brother went down the rabbit hole of drinking too much and I watched helplessly from a far distance as he went missing and turned up dead on the floor of his own apartment. I had said that he was burning too intensely to carry on for long, and rightly predicted that we would have to contend with putting him in the ground. The circumstances surrounding his death are clouded partially in mystery, but it is well documented by the Navy that he was having a major drinking problem before he died. He was 25.

I want to blame my father, or his father who schooled him in the ways of the bottle and emotional abandonment. I want to rage at the loss of my brother, my college fund, at my hopes for family normalcy. I want to show him how he made me feel worthless. I want to level these things at my dad. But then I look at him, and I see a frail, sickly, and finally sober shell of what my mom says swept her off her feet in hopeless romance. I don't see the man who wrote her drippy romantic, soulful poetry. I don't see the young man who pushed me on the swing as a very small child.  I see someone who, if faced by the full measure of my experience, would crumple like burnt tissue. He's there, burnt already, and holding his shape by sheer force of will. A whisper would scatter him.

Really, that dynamic, romantic artist is gone. Like the angelic boy soprano he was, when he hit puberty he did not mellow into a mature tenor. He cracked and was no more. He couldn't ever after carry a tune any more than he could carry responsibility or joy. He couldn't deal. He was a lead pencil in a broadband world. His capacity was reduced to nil.

I hear from him every few months now. I see that he is trying to be somewhat present in my life. He calls after months of forgotten or failed attempts to remember I am a part of his family. I hear his remorse. If I wanted to reconcile with my father, he is still here on this planet. I see his desire for my forgiveness. I blankly and without much feeling absolve him, my hands in a nonmagic gesture of benediction. I tell him I need nothing from him, not so much because it is true, but because I know I will never truly get what I need, not from him anyway. I am letting him off the hook. I have given what I can to him. I have thrown years of love down a dark hole to him, but he never took my lifeline. He only memorably told me that he wished I was born male so he could punch me in the face. No amount of telling me feebly that he loves me now will erase that. That takes bigger, more fearless and transcendent love that he just cannot produce or hold in his heart. I am left to work on it within myself. Despite being told I am worthless, I have to believe in my worth, love myself, and somehow forgive a man who probably was too wasted to remember saying that to me and shattering me into fragments.

Maybe only other addicts can really understand him, really help him. I am from the other world, with all my judgements and moral superiority for having never fallen prey to the bottle or the freshly chopped line. The hole in me mirrors the hole in him. I fill it with minor peccadilloes, perhaps. I am no saint. But somehow my need to consume Chex Mix doesn't seem to interfere with my ability to love others, although perhaps parts of myself. I am sometimes driven by the desire to be perfect, even though that conceit is the worst form of self-loathing.

But, lacking perfection, how am I to offer myself to the world? How do I consider myself worthy of the love I want in my life? I can bake a killer cake, save the life of a sick person, and even comfort the dying. But what if people knew that I couldn't save my brother? I couldn't heal my father? I couldn't be enough to stop the gnawing monster of addiction from greedily devouring the people I cared most about? Does it matter how kind or good I am? I will bet it does, to people with the capacity. But some people lack that. You can call down to them forever, and ultimately have to rise up from the chasm's edge and step back, lest you fall in yourself.

I am not an addict. I know I can go to Al-Anon for support if I wanted to. I just don't want my father's failings to define me.

I am trying to resonate with kindness and compassion in my life. This lesson is a hard one. It is going to take a lot more work. But I am alive today. I am aware today. I am grateful for that. The frustrated tears I shed over this are just part of the landscape. I don't have to be perfect. I just have to be trying to be good. That is enough. That is a lot more than others may have. Just by virtue of looking at this and attempting to unravel the Gordian Knot , I am better than I was on days when I merely felt sorry for myself. One day I will claim my destiny and cut the knot with one stroke and be done with it. Alexandrian solutions are not lost on me. In the meantime I hope I can at least see it for what it is: a yoke bound to an ox-cart. Just a symbol of what could be. Can I combine my conqueror's heart with the will toward compassion? I can try.