TL;DR Because they listened. Before my second brain surgery at fifteen, my doctors asked what scared me most. Losing my hair, I said. Months later I woke up from surgery and it was still there. I found out years afterward that my nurses had remembered, and made sure my head was never shaved.
My tumor came back when I was fifteen. A few months before the second surgery, my doctors sat me down and asked what I was most afraid of. I could have said the surgery, or the risk, or the odds. What I actually said was that I did not want them to shave my head. I had lost my hair once already, and I did not want to lose it again.
When I woke up from surgery most of my hair was still there.
While the doctors and the anesthesiologist were prepping for surgery — running the checklist and moving fast — my nurses remembered the thing I had said months before. They kept my head from being shaved. Nobody told me. It is one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.
Somebody says, “Please welcome Kelsey Tainsh,” and I walk out and tell a room of nurses a story about nurses. This is the part they go quiet for, every time. Because they have all done something like it, and mostly nobody ever found out.
The thing I was scared of was small. A fifteen-year-old’s hair, in the middle of brain surgery, is not the clinical priority, and everyone in that room knew it. My nurses filed it away anyway. I’ve spent the last decade as a healthcare keynote speaker saying this out loud to the people who do it: that is the whole job, the part that never makes the chart.
What I did not know then—and what I learned a few years later—is that it was my nurses who made sure my head was not shaved.
— I’m Not Limping. That’s Swagger!, Chapter 8
You may not get thanked for most of it. The patient may not always know. That is what makes it matter.
How to catch the thing that isn’t on the chart
- Ask patients what scares them most, then write it down.
- Protect the small fear even when it isn’t clinical.
There’s a lot more of this in my book, I’m Not Limping. That’s Swagger! Chapter 8 is mostly me trying to thank people whose kindness I only found out about years later. If you’re planning a nursing conference or nurses week event and you want your team to hear what those small, unrecorded moments actually do to a patient, that’s the best conversation I have as a healthcare keynote speaker.
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