Continuing the Legacy: More Voices of Oncology Nurses
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Introduction
I have been privileged for the second time to edit a book of oncology nurses' stories. Storytelling is an ancient tradition and one that is gaining more attention in the business world as an important humanistic strategy. Stories educate, illustrate, motivate, and comfort you. They capture the experience one has, document important happenings, and offer an interpretation of events. They can bring a tear and a laugh. The stories in this book do all of that.
Like the first edition, Building a Legacy ... Voices of Oncology Nurses, this book builds two legacies. The first is the legacy of the rich stories of the nurses who are sharing themselves with you. The second is the legacy that the royalties from the books create as they are added to the endowment of the ONS Foundation. The Foundation's endowment will support education, research, and leadership development for oncology nurses' voices yet to come. In your purchase of this book, you have supported the Foundation. Thank you.
When Building a Legacy was proposed, I recall a discussion that the publisher, Pearl Moore, other ONS staff, and I had in which we visualized a series of volumes, each added at a reasonable interval. This would allow us to have a library of the narrative history of oncology nursing and cancer care through the voices of oncology nurses from diverse backgrounds and settings. With Continuing the Legacy, the ONS Publishing Division has made that vision a reality. I thank them for supporting this endeavor.
From the authors in this book, I have been reminded that the telling of one's story can have a tremendous impact on the authors themselves. Many mentioned how the experience of writing their story was so meaningful to them. I think as you read their stories you will understand.
There are themes through these stories, many the same as in the first volume. You will note the themes as you read the stories: caring, compassion, advocacy, pride, passion, collegiality, gratitude to mentors, thirst for learning, commitment to the profession, and exceeding one's earliest idea of what being a nurse is. There are other themes: sadness, loss, frustration, anger at cancer's indiscrimination, fatigue, stressful working conditions, and the struggle to have personal balance. The most powerful theme is the resiliency and strength of the human spirit—of the authors and of the people for whom they cared.
Each story is unique, however, and the journey each nurse has taken is not the same. Several of the authors are second career nurses and talk about being the oldest student in their class. Their stories resonate with our current effort in nursing to recruit second career students, as we seek to lessen the nursing shortage. Several authors have experienced cancer themselves or have had a close family member experience cancer. How generously they describe what it is like to be the patient or the daughter or the sister or the son. I know some of these authors very well and others were strangers to me until I read their stories. None are strangers now.
Each author has also contributed a special message to young people who might be considering a nursing career or who have not yet thought about what career they want. These messages to young people need to be shared widely. As we face a future characterized by decreasing numbers of nurses and increasing numbers of elderly, we can see the potential crisis ahead. Each one of us should be recruiting young people into our profession. Yes, it is stressful, and there are days that we would all like to forget. However, as these stories show and the messages so beautifully articulate, the rewards in nursing outweigh the negatives. I hope you will use this book as a way to have conversations with young people.
I thank the 30 authors in this book for continuing the legacy of oncology nursing by contributing their voice. I also would like to acknowledge Christin Hess at the Duke School of Nursing, who has assisted me with the manuscript preparation and enjoyed a rich lesson in what nurses are and do. The Commercial Publishing Team of the ONS Publishing Division has given their talent and support to this project. My husband has always been the best editorial assistant in my writing career and he has again supported me through another book. Ben, it may not be the last!
Brenda Nevidjon, MSN, RN