caring

What is it to be cared for, or rather, what is it to feel cared for? An experience I had as a very young child defines the feeling for me. I will examine just what it was about that experience so long ago that brought about that feeling of being cared for. But what are the characteristics of caring and can those characteristics be translated into a nursing practice? In a recent study on the caring aspects of nurses in the emergency room, it was found that caring was lacking among nurses. The authors of the study, Wiman and Wikblad (2004), emphasized caring in nurses as “seeing the other person as a unique individual” (p. 423). That is what happened in my case: I felt I was seen for the very first time.

I grew up in a big Catholic family. There was love in our home but a lot of chaos as well. My father was a successful businessman, self-made, bringing himself up out of the poverty of the Depression with ambition and drive. Handsome, funny, and good-natured, he showered my brothers and sisters and me with love and attention. My mother was a housewife who grew up in a poor immigrant family, the tenth daughter in a family of 13 children who received little attention from either of her hard-working parents. She in turn was aloof and distant as a mother, erratic in her moods, rarely showing affection toward me and my sisters.

Despite all the chaos of my early childhood, I have a clear and wonderful memory of my mother. I must have been three or four, maybe five years old at the time. I had just awoken from an afternoon nap and I walked out of my bedroom into the living room. It was raining outside and the house was peacefully quiet. I went around the corner and there was my mother, alone, sitting cross-legged with her ba...

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Nusing students spend a great deal of time learning the nursing process. One of the most important part of this process is assessing our patients. I suspect that the expert nurse uses both empathy and intuitive knowing to accomplish rom

In the end, I learned many things from my mother. Some were useful and some were maladaptive, but they all made me who I am today. What I did not learn from her, I learned on my own and from others. But the essential gifts of learning empathy and intuitive knowing from my mother will give me a foundation on which to build a caring nursing practice. AWith all of the empirical knowledge we learn as nursing students, we will be well served to remember what it felt like to be cared for. this will lead us to be caring professionals so that we can more easily navigate the murky and magical waters of patient’s care.