my name is Miray and i am a nursing student in Lebanon. I have a presentation to make about homosexual patients and the care they receive by nurses so i need some help. If anyone has ever cared for a homosexual (male/female) then can you tell me what you did? how you reacted? and what you could have done to care for that patient better?
the answers can be anonymous if you want and this is not a topic of who is with or against i just want to show my classmates how people react differently to some situations.
One additional point for you to consider and perhaps include in your presentation: cross-cultural research studies consistently estimate between 2 and 10% of the human population to be homosexual. So out of every 100 patients cared for, statistically, at least 2 - 10 of them are homosexual, whether or the nurse is aware of it or not.
OP, posting to your second question about "how I feel about it".. I feel no different than with a hetero couple. They are people all the same with the same needs as me :) I guess this is just difficult for me to express because "gay" or "straight" its a non-issue period..
Except that guy in Sandy Hook- that was a monster!!!!
Do you really know anything about "That guy in Sandy Hill?" Was he a schizophrenic, following the commands of the voices in his head? Unless I see evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume that he was a very sick cookie - not a monster.
Off topic I know, but your statement touched a nerve. I know parents of mentally ill children. The children are not monsters. They are very unfortunate human beings.
This is a non issue. Maybe a better topic might be "Why is it still an issue in your country " (or how it even merits being a topic in your school )
I disagree. It may be a non-issue for you and me and other nurses but the reality is that there are still some health care providers whom this IS an issue for.
I have seen health care providers treat patients differently based on their sex, weight, race, and economic status( which I have reported). I don't see how this would be any different. It may be rare but I believe it happens and it is sad.
I'm old enough that I worked ICU when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, and I was in the San Francisco-Seattle axis where we had a lot of gay patients anyway. I must say that it was a time when I was not proud of a lot of my colleagues. I would take my patient assignment of some poor man with what was then a fatal pneumocystis pneumonia (thank god we have better treatment now) and soon a fearful face would peek around the door with the unspoken question: Would this nurse let me in to see my lover who is dying? So many wouldn't, would shoo them away saying, "Family only!" as if the patient would have any family members who would even acknowledge his existence. It absolutely broke my heart. "Please come in," I would say. "I'm sure he'd be so happy to have you here. Would you like to help me bathe him?" "Can I?" "Of course you can, I'm sure he'd prefer you to me at this point!" The tenderness between these guys was indescribable.
I had one experience, among so many, that was particularly heartbreaking. I was floated to a general surgery floor for a coupla summer days and for some reason we had a man with pulmonary failure on the "hot" side of the house, where the sun just baked the rooms all afternoon and no amount of air-conditioning would keep up with it. He wasn't my patient but I covered him when his nurse went to lunch, and his light went on. "Hey, Jen's at lunch. I'm GrnTea, what can I do for you?" He was lying in bed with the oxygen on, sweating and breathing with difficulty, and he said, "I'm just so hot. Can you help me?" So I got a basin of ice chips and alcohol (remember that? We did that before we had cooling blankets) and some washcloths and started to swab him down. And he started to cry. I stopped, startled, said, "What? What? Am I hurting you?" and he wept and wept and said (and this is where I start to cry now and every time I think of this story, thirty years later), "Nobody has touched me for three weeks." That poor man, in the hospital sick as a dog and knowing he was probably going to die very soon, and not one nurse had helped him bathe or eat or turn as he got weaker and weaker. It broke my heart.
The next day I went in and asked to care for him again. He had been found dead on the floor of his room, having taken off his oxygen to go to the bathroom, probably because he thought nobody would answer his light, and probably desaturated enough to pass out. And they didn't find him until change of shift because nobody looked in on him all night.
I haven't read any comments yet...but if I even know that a patient is homosexual, nothing about my nursing care changes...nothing. Maybe it's a cultural thing and this has more significance in Lebanon? Idk.
ETA: I see the cultural thing has already been addressed, sorry!
Judging by the statistics, all nurses take care of homosexual patients all the time (even in Iran...), though they may not be aware of the patient's orientation.
Last week I took care of two homosexual patients, which I knew only because they were present with their partners. I'm not aware of any way in which our interactions were any different than with my heterosexual patients... sexuality was not part of the care plan nor the patients' needs.
Homosexuality is against the law in Lebanon and is punishable by a year in prison. Comparing how they are treated in the US and western countries and how they are treated in Arab countries is like comparing apples to oranges.
I'm old enough that I worked ICU when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, and I was in the San Francisco-Seattle axis where we had a lot of gay patients anyway. I must say that it was a time when I was not proud of a lot of my colleagues. I would take my patient assignment of some poor man with what was then a fatal pneumocystis pneumonia (thank god we have better treatment now) and soon a fearful face would peek around the door with the unspoken question: Would this nurse let me in to see my lover who is dying? So many wouldn't, would shoo them away saying, "Family only!" as if the patient would have any family members who would even acknowledge his existence. It absolutely broke my heart. "Please come in," I would say. "I'm sure he'd be so happy to have you here. Would you like to help me bathe him?" "Can I?" "Of course you can, I'm sure he'd prefer you to me at this point!" The tenderness between these guys was indescribable.
I had one experience, among so many, that was particularly heartbreaking. I was floated to a general surgery floor for a coupla summer days and for some reason we had a man with pulmonary failure on the "hot" side of the house, where the sun just baked the rooms all afternoon and no amount of air-conditioning would keep up with it. He wasn't my patient but I covered him when his nurse went to lunch, and his light went on. "Hey, Jen's at lunch. I'm GrnTea, what can I do for you?" He was lying in bed with the oxygen on, sweating and breathing with difficulty, and he said, "I'm just so hot. Can you help me?" So I got a basin of ice chips and alcohol (remember that? We did that before we had cooling blankets) and some washcloths and started to swab him down. And he started to cry. I stopped, startled, said, "What? What? Am I hurting you?" and he wept and wept and said (and this is where I start to cry now and every time I think of this story, thirty years later), "Nobody has touched me for three weeks." That poor man, in the hospital sick as a dog and knowing he was probably going to die very soon, and not one nurse had helped him bathe or eat or turn as he got weaker and weaker. It broke my heart.
The next day I went in and asked to care for him again. He had been found dead on the floor of his room, having taken off his oxygen to go to the bathroom, probably because he thought nobody would answer his light, and probably desaturated enough to pass out. And they didn't find him until change of shift because nobody looked in on him all night.
OP, it is NOT like this anymore.
You rock girl!
Sadly the 1980's/early AIDS epidemic were *NOT* a shining moment for many healthcare facilities and workers/professionals. About the only sympathy that could be found was for the wee babies born to infected mothers, the prevailing attitude towards the rest could often be summed up as the disease was "killing all the right people".
Say what people want about the Catholic Church, but it was the insitutions run and or founded by religous orders that often took the lead in providing care for AIDS patients as well as research into the disease and developing care standards.
Saint Vincent's Hospital Greenwhich Village, Saint Clare's Hospital (later known as Saint Vincent's Mid-Town), Cabrini Hospital amoung all the other NYC/Manhattan facilities run by various sisters or brothers were active early and hard when the crisis hit. Saint Vinny's would often become so packed with patients "rooms" were created in hallways by marking the floor around a bed/stretcher in a hallway with tape. Other NYC hospitals including some of the biggest such as NYP would literally dump their AIDS patients at any Catholic hospital's doorstep they could, and they were always taken in. The late Archbishop John Joseph O'Connor would show up at hospitals late in the day evening and offer to assist with any sort of patient care staff would allow. His Grace felt strongly that the afflicted were special to God.
The "gay marriage" movement found it's roots as indeed the major push towards equality in the horrible ashes of the AIDs crisis.
Just as GrnTea mentioned hospitals/facilities often treated life partners of LGBT persons as if they didn't count. Parents and or estranged spouses (but still legally married) and adult children/siblings would often show up at hospital and push the partner aside and start making all healthcare decisions upto and often including having the partner banned from visiting. When the patient died *family* would show up and exercise their rights to claim the entire estate regardless of the partner. Homes, property and other assets were simply taken absent strong legal protection otherwise. Sometimes even then that didn't work because the family/spouse would go to court to push their rights/claims and more often than not won.
Mark of a true and great actress, not to mention southern belle is how Rue "Blance" intones "lesbian" for the third time. *LOL* You can just see how her mind is processing the information but just can't wrap itself around the concept, then finally a fog lifts! Sort of like when Edith Bunker would go " ohhhh"!
Altra, BSN, RN
6,255 Posts
One additional point for you to consider and perhaps include in your presentation: cross-cultural research studies consistently estimate between 2 and 10% of the human population to be homosexual. So out of every 100 patients cared for, statistically, at least 2 - 10 of them are homosexual, whether or the nurse is aware of it or not.