Obstetrical Nursing / A Text-Book on the Nursing Care of the Expectant Mother, the Woman in Labor, the Young Mother and Her Baby

by Carolyn Conant Van Blarcom

4. Sympathy—for every mental and physical stress which the patient may suffer.

If the nurse convinces herself of the import of these requirements and is exacting of herself in giving them broad interpretation, she cannot but nurse her patients well.

She will appreciate the invariable need for cleanliness and watchfulness if she will hark back to the fact that our mothers and babies die in distressingly large numbers from infections, toxæmias, and nutritional disturbances, all of which are usually amenable to preventive or early treatment.

In order to be always clean, always watchful, and always ready to execute, both in letter and spirit, the orders of doctors whose methods of treatment will differ, the nurse will need to be very adaptable. She will need to keep a clear head and an open mind and to remember always the ends that are being striven for: the immediate safety and the future wellbeing of the mother and the baby. And she may rest assured that, no matter how they vary as to details, all doctors want all of their patients to be given clean care; watched for symptoms of complications; and given good general nursing.

Considering the need for cleanliness in a very broad and practical sense, the nurse will realize that the test of her ability to protect her maternity patients from infection is not what she is able to do in a hospital where there is every facility for clean work. It is not the ability to maintain asepsis in a tiled operating room that counts, where she is aided by sterilizers, basins, and solutions of various kinds and colors, a wealth of ingenious appliances and a corps of co-workers. It is the understanding and imagination which will enable her, perhaps single-handed, to carry the principles of such work into a patient’s home; to do clean work, from the standpoint of avoiding infection, in a mountain hut or a city tenement where everything is dirty.

The nurse will do well to begin to develop her powers of adaptability while she is still in training. She may greatly increase the value of her hospital experience by trying always to understand the purpose of the care which she is giving and trying at the same time to imagine how, in an average home, she would accomplish the results of this or that procedure which is made easy of execution in the hospital by special equipment. She should never lose sight of the fact that she is not being trained solely to conform to any one hospital routine or to become expert in only one method of nursing care. She is being prepared to go out and give nursing care to any young woman and her baby who need it, no matter where or how they are situated or by what methods they are treated.

If conditions are such that the doctor’s orders and the patient’s requirements seem impossible of fulfillment, then the nurse must attempt the impossible and attempt it with confidence of success.

It is clear that the nurse must cultivate adaptability and resourcefulness if she is to give good care to all her patients under all conditions. But even the most efficient and intelligent work will not be wholly satisfactory unless it is infused with a spirit of sympathy for the woman as an individual.

The thing that counts in this connection is what the nurse, herself, means to the woman who is facing a very important and mysterious event, who, after every known aid has been given, must still go through a great deal alone, both mentally and physically. It is not helpful to a woman in such a situation to be told that women have borne children since the dawn of Creation and that they all have had pain; that she will have to go through with it, as they have, and that the less fuss she makes about it the better. But it does help her to have the nurse say that she has been with so many women in labor that she knows they suffer intensely, and because she knows it so well she wants to do all that lies in her power to give even a little relief. The nurse may never know just how she has helped and reassured; how a pain was made a little easier to bear, not only by the hand slipped under an aching back, but also by the sympathy that the act conveyed. But she may be sure that she has helped.

In such a connection, the nurse must guard against the mistake of dividing her patients into well defined groups: those who are poor and those who are more favored. If she unfailingly looks for the human being beyond the patient she will find some of the most sensitive and appreciative of women among the simplest and poorest and they will be warmly responsive to a thoughtful, considerate attitude. And at the same time, the patient in comfortable circumstances who seems to be surrounded by all that one could desire, is often pathetically lonely and isolated. She, too, will be appreciative of encouragement and an attitude of concern for her comfort.