TL;DR: Because somebody asks, and somebody else carries it. I was fifteen, a few months out from my second brain surgery, and I told my doctors the thing I feared most was losing my hair. I woke up with most of it still there. My nurses did that, and I did not learn about it for years.
A few months before my second brain surgery, I sat in a room with my parents, a nurse, and my oncologist. They asked me what I was most afraid of. I was fifteen. I did not say dying and I did not say the operating room. I said I did not want my head shaved. I did not want to lose my long hair again. I had already lost it once at five years old, and I remembered exactly what that felt like.
When I woke up from surgery, most of my hair was still there.
I did not learn until a few years later that my nurses were the reason. While the doctors and the anesthesiologist were getting ready, my nurses were in charge of prepping the incision site — and they remembered. Nobody told me at the time. Nobody came looking for the credit. It is still one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.
I have spent the last ten years as a healthcare keynote speaker, which mostly means I stand in front of the people who once carried me down a hallway. Somebody says, “Please give a warm welcome for Kelsey Tainsh,” and I walk out and tell them this. The room always goes quiet.
Here is the part I want you to sit with. A scared teenager told a room of adults the truth about her fear, and somebody decided that truth was worth keeping. It did not move a single number on a chart. It changed the first thing I saw in the mirror after brain surgery, and I have carried it for twenty years.
It takes a special kind of angel to be a nurse.
— I’m Not Limping. That’s Swagger!, Chapter 8
I never got their names. I have never forgotten what they did.
What I hope you take into your next shift
- Ask what scares your patient most, then write the answer down.
- Hand off the fear at shift change, not only the vitals.
- Do the small kind thing even when nobody will ever know.
There is a lot more of this in my book, and Chapter 8 is mostly me trying to thank people whose names I never got. If your nurses could use a morning where somebody says out loud what their work actually does to a patient, that conversation is my favorite part of the year as a healthcare keynote speaker.
Book: https://kelseytainsh.com/kelseys-book/ · Speaking: https://kelseytainsh.com/nursing/
Things nurses ask me after I tell this one
How do you find out what a patient is actually afraid of?
Ask, and then be quiet long enough for a real answer. When my team asked me before my second surgery, I did not say dying. I said my hair. It sounded small and it was not small. Most people will give you the true answer the first time, as long as you do not fill the silence for them.
Isn’t worrying about a teenager’s hair a waste of time in an operating room?
I understand why it sounds that way, and I would much rather you keep me alive. But the surgery took a morning and the mirror took years. My nurses did both. They got the incision site ready correctly, and they did it in a way that let a fifteen-year-old still recognize herself afterward. Those two things were never in competition.
Do patients ever find out who did something like that for them?
Sometimes, and usually late. I did not learn about my hair for a few years, and by then I had no way to thank anyone. If you are waiting for a patient to notice in the moment, you will wait a long time. Do it anyway. The ones who find out later tend to tell the story for the rest of their lives.
Quote Q30 pulled from Chapter 8. Confirm against print edition before publishing.
Recent Comments