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Abstract
In this inquiry I explore how a personal serious illness of three nurse-teachers impacts their teaching and nursing practice. My interest in illness stories emerges in response to my own experience of becoming a patient thirteen years ago. As a result of this circumstance I became curious to learn how other nurse-teachers may experience personal illness events. To help me think about my puzzle I chose Connelly and Clandinin's narrative inquiry, where narrative is both the method and the phenomenon of study. In this research my two co-participants and I talk about what it is like for a person, who is also a nurse-teacher, to walk on the other side of being. Throughout the five meetings, which took place over the course of eight months, we shared conversations, drawings and creative writing with the intent to gain a deeper insight into the significance of our own illness encounters. Based on the told stories I crafted two main storylines and juxtaposed my own, in the shape of three journal entries, along with those of my co-participants. I wrote a response letter to each illness narrative followed by my own reflection on these. Two important notions come to light as a result of my exploration. I find that the personal and the professional not only intersect within sick nurse-teachers, patientnurses, but continue to co-exist within them for the duration of the illness. Even though these nurse-teachers become ill they seem to never fully leave their caregiver role behind. They watch and monitor their care providers and thus become simultaneously both, the caregivers and the carereceivers. Another significant narrative thread that emerges speaks to the quality of nurse-patient relationships. It appears that some caregivers connect with their patients only at the logical level of the mind and the physical treatment of the disease with little attention given to the human response to the illness event. Hence, what I find lacking in the caregiver-carereceiver relationships is the human connectedness, the spiritual component of ourselves. In this fashion, my thesis serves to illuminate this insufficiently developed aspect of patient care.
