Both opportunities touched that part of me that is passionate about inspiring hope in others and contributing to their well being, fulfillment and satisfaction. It is my desire to write in a way that invites you to take the next step and move your own life to the next level. So get in touch with that still, small voice inside and learn to trust the evolutionary being that we are.
Make a difference in your world, more of the time...and when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Remember everything confronting you on your journey through life has potential for both opportunity as well as crisis. It is how we choose to see it that makes all the difference. So, "When life presents you with a fork in the road, take it!" and navigate it to the best of your ability, avoiding crisis and maximizing opportunity. Which is exactly what I did these past two months.
Without further delay, I leave you with the final things I love about a career chosen by default.
HUMAN RESPONSE PATTERNS
I had been using a process to develop plans of care for my patients developed by NANDA (formerly the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association) for most of my career. To explain it simply, nursing diagnoses are clinical judgments about human experiences and responses to health conditions and life processes that help focus on methods and strategies for helping a person achieve better or greater health.
Having used them as a matter of routine, imagine my surprise in discovering those individual diagnoses such as alteration in comfort, relocation stress syndrome, etc. were actually built on something called human response patterns, 9 of them to be exact, that informed everything I knew or had intuitively grasped while caring for people. It was like a light bulb suddenly went on in my mind and the bigger picture of human potential and growth became clear.
Those 9 human response patterns, with a short explanation, are:
EXCHANGING - physical and chemical processes/homeostasis
COMMUNICATING - sending messages
RELATING - establishing bonds
VALUING - assigning relative worth
CHOOSING - selecting alternatives
MOVING - activity
PERCEIVING - receiving information
KNOWING - meaning associated with information
FEELING - subjective awareness
From that point on, I began to understand that all patient behavior, symptoms, lifestyles, choices, etc. coalesce into recognizable human response patterns. ‘Pattern recognition’ became my buzz word for bridging the science and the art of nursing and expanded my ability to take people from point A to point B more effectively. How wonderful it was to learn and use a deeper, broader, more effective base of nursing knowledge and wisdom, and how much more satisfying my interaction became with people from all walks of life.
SPIRITUALITY/HOLISM/CUTTING EDGE NEW THOUGHT
It was this path into holistic nursing that literally transformed and launched the second half of my career. The holistic nursing program occupied two and a half years of my life and become a strong plank in the foundation I used to make sense of the spiritual awakening I was undergoing. It formed the organizing principle behind my understanding of life and the world at large.
In 1989, a critical juncture in my personal and professional life, I was seriously considering changing careers altogether. I had owned a small healthcare consulting business and made more money than I'd ever dreamed possible. I was clearly at a juncture in my career but, after working a few months as a grocery checker, for which the manager pointed out I was sorely overqualified, I took a position in a rehab hospital.
I had gone to a medical bookstore for a care planning book to brush up on my clinical skills. While walking down an aisle in the nursing section, a large, pink volume literally fell off the shelf as I approached...The Handbook of Holistic Nursing Practice. Now I had witnessed a number of amazing events in emergency rooms and intensive care units, things that at times seemed truly miraculous because they defied explanation. But that day it struck me as odd that a book would seemingly jump off a shelf in front of me as if trying to get my attention.
In hindsight I know there are no coincidences and that things always happen for a reason. Picking up that book changed my life and the journey that followed is really beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, I began to see and become aware of a realm operating behind the day to day world with which we are more commonly familiar. The health challenges people were presenting began to show me how consciousness was an emerging, expanding, transforming process occurring in each and every individual, a process in which we are all participating but which is most often seen during health crises.
Helping my patients navigate these challenges and assisting them in ‘seeing’ with a new set of eyes the transformation within their challenge taught me that health is expanding consciousness and that every health challenge brings an invitation to expand, grow and develop the next level of who we are becoming. It became obvious that evolution doesn't just happen over thousands and thousands of years, it happens in every moment, with every choice, in every interaction with another, and with every thing we do and think.
In 1989, a critical juncture in my personal and professional life, I was seriously considering changing careers altogether. I had owned a small healthcare consulting business and made more money than I'd ever dreamed possible. I was clearly at a juncture in my career but, after working a few months as a grocery checker, for which the manager pointed out I was sorely overqualified, I took a position in a rehab hospital.
I had gone to a medical bookstore for a care planning book to brush up on my clinical skills. While walking down an aisle in the nursing section, a large, pink volume literally fell off the shelf as I approached...The Handbook of Holistic Nursing Practice. Now I had witnessed a number of amazing events in emergency rooms and intensive care units, things that at times seemed truly miraculous because they defied explanation. But that day it struck me as odd that a book would seemingly jump off a shelf in front of me as if trying to get my attention.
In hindsight I know there are no coincidences and that things always happen for a reason. Picking up that book changed my life and the journey that followed is really beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, I began to see and become aware of a realm operating behind the day to day world with which we are more commonly familiar. The health challenges people were presenting began to show me how consciousness was an emerging, expanding, transforming process occurring in each and every individual, a process in which we are all participating but which is most often seen during health crises.
Nursing, once again, became the vehicle for my own next level of growth and development. In hindsight it is easy to see that my nursing career did NOT live up to the expectations I had placed on it when I was forced to abandon my initial career choice in journalism. But, how could it? Those expectations were far too small for the journey. Nursing had its own plans for me. Bigger plans. Better plans. Plans I could have never dreamed. It has taught me and shown me the depth and breadth of emotion and the heights of transcendent moments. It has made me a bigger and definitely better person. It has been a career that has changed me and allowed me to learn to love, to live with the unseen and to trust in the unknown mystery that always lies before us.
