I just submitted my link to nursingvoices.com and was sent this reply:
“We’d definitely love to have you, but are you planning on continuing to blog? I notice that you haven’t written in almost three weeks and only twice in the last two months.”
Ouch. The truth hurts. Just why is it that I can?t get motivated to blog?
I read Emergiblog and am always amazed. Kim does such a great job of constantly updating her blog and everything she writes is so fresh, and funny and relevant. How on earth do you do it, Kim? And here I am calling experinced nurses like you a dinosaur! Shame on me.
Some possible explanations:
Take Geeknurse. He had a wonderful blog and he was apparently forced to shut it down by his institution (no doubt the GHOAT of New Zealand). I live in constant fear of this and so absolutely no one at work knows that I have a blog. But what this amounts to is that I am one heck of a lonely blogger. I feel like I have so many stories to tell about my unit and yet some of the people who would appreciate them the most (my coworkers) will never be graced with my creative meanderings.
I also live in constant fear of HIPPA regulations. The stories I would like to tell are so personal to the patient. And they are certainly not in a position for me to even ask permission to write about them (zoinked out on Fentanyl and Versed, or else in the throws of hepatic encephalopathy, you get the picture.) There are plenty of times when I would like to write about the family, and how they are dealing with the situation, but even then I never feel it is appropriate to ask.
Also, I kind of got hung up on the whole Grand Rounds thing. It just seems so MD-centric. I know, I know ? if I actually contributed to it, then perhaps it would be more RN-centric, or at least more RN-ish. But, #1 I never seem to make the deadline, and #2 I once sent in a post on time and the host failed to include it for some unkown reason.
Excuses, excuses.
At any rate, I am hoping to find my motivation. It may have come in the form of a MICU survivor that I had the pleasure of meeting last week. It was at a MICU workshop I attended. She is a young woman who managed to be a patient in the MICU for a very long time (and was on every type of support we could offer) and made it out alive to tell her story. With her permission I am hoping to tell you her story in the following weeks.