Bringing Nursing Back To The Bedside

By Kaaren Valenta

When Cai McPhee decided to become a nurse, it was because she wanted to help people. And when she discovered the field of holistic medicine, she knew it was meant for her.

“The profession has so many different choices now –– the options are wide open,” Mrs McPhee said. “You can get a doctorate in nursing. There are nurses in research and pharmacology. The field is wide open. I think people, especially young people who are still choosing careers, should learn more about these opportunities, especially since there is such a shortage of nurses now.”

A Newtown resident, Mrs McPhee was working at St Vincent’s Hospital in 1998 when she received a letter notifying her of a presentation on holistic nursing that was going to be held at the Stony Hill Inn in Bethel.

“When I read it, I thought ‘What is this?’ I knew I had to be there. It called to me.”

One of the primary speakers was Ellen McMahon, a graduate of the College of New Rochelle who was working at Columbia Hospital, in the operating rooms, giving therapeutic touch to patients who requested it, while they were undergoing surgery.

“When she described what she was doing, I thought ‘Wow,’” Mrs McPhee said. “She told me that there was a master’s of science degree in holistic nursing and I decided ‘that’s for me!’”

While Mrs McPhee’s nursing career had been rewarding, she had found herself frustrated by the increasing demands on nurses to do tasks that removed them from their patients.

“Whenever I had an evaluation, I was always told that my problem was that I spend too much time with my patients. I need to better budget my time. But that’s not why I went into nursing,” she said. “It used to be routine for nurses to do backrubs. Now nurses are doing the jobs of two or three people, minding machines, and answering telephone calls.”

Born in Brazil, Mrs McPhee has lived in the United States since she was seven years old. As she grew up in New York City, she found she had a desire to help people, to be involved with humanity. She earned an associate’s degree in science and became a registered nurse. She also met and married Joseph McPhee, who teaches anatomy and physiology at LaGuardia Community College, a branch of the City University of New York. The couple moved to Riverside Road in Sandy Hook after their daughter, Kelley, 12, was born.

 Mrs McPhee graduated from Western Connecticut State University in Danbury with a bachelor’s degree in nursing on her daughter’s fifth birthday. Recently the McPhees moved to Parmalee Hill Road.

After graduation, Mrs McPhee worked at Glenn Hill Rehabilitation Center in Danbury, and later at Datahr Rehabilitation Center as a primary care nurse.

“It was challenging, yet a very educational experience at Datahr,” she said. “I loved working with my patients. I had 27 clients, most of whom had traumatic brain injury or mental retardation.”

She left Datahr in 1999 to take a position at St Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, an acute care setting. “So I went from subacute at Glenn Hill, to chronic at Datahr to acute care at St Vincent’s,” she explained. “I worked at St Vincent’s until this semester.”

Currently she is more than halfway through the master’s in holistic nursing program at the College of New Rochelle, and is a member of the nursing honor society Sigma Theta Tau.

“Nursing is a profession that is changing just like the rest of the health care field,” she said. “I knew I had to go into holistic nursing, and that doesn’t really mean alternative health care. I’m not choosing one kind of medicine over another. Instead, it is bringing in this new knowledge and creating a union. It is combining allopathic medicine with holistic. I don’t say that one is better than the other. They are complementary.”

Physicians prescribe drugs, but their education traditionally has not included other modalities such as relaxation techniques, meditation, aromatherapy, accupressure, acupuncture, and other forms of complementary medicine, she explained.

“People want other modalities –– they are paying out of pocket for it,” she said. “People want to help themselves in some other way than just taking a pill. Holistic nursing is geared toward getting it into the clinical setting.”

Beth Israel Hospital in New York has a holistic care center, she said. “St Johns in Riverside gives the patients a list of complementary medicine services each day to find out what they want and tries to schedule them, just as if they were getting a cat scan or an x-ray.”

At New Rochelle, the students have a choice in the modalities they will study.

“There are many, such as polarity, Shiatsu, aromatherapy, Reiki, and reflexology,” she said. “Reflexology is working with the feet to increase circulation to different areas of the body. It relaxes you. In the hospital setting, if I can help a patient who is agitated or having trouble sleeping, I can do five minutes of reflexology to help them.

 “Reflexology gives me something I can do that doesn’t have side effects and helps the people to relax. It gives people something they can utilize. It is subtle, not magic, but it can contribute to your relaxation and you can do something for yourself.”

Mrs McPhee also has a certification in therapeutic touch and is working on one in aromatherapy.

“It should all come together to use all the senses,” she explained.

While at St Vincent’s she taught relaxation techniques to patients and wrote a protocol.

“There are relaxation techniques that you can use in bed, or while waiting on line at the checkout counter,” she said. “It requires a simple awareness of the breath, called mindfulness. Most patients were very receptive. You tune into your breathing and become totally serene. Patients told me ‘I never thought that being aware of my breathing could bring me such peace.’”

Holistic nursing techniques are not for everyone, Mrs McPhee said.

“That’s why there are so many different kinds of modalities,” she said. “It requires that you seek to find out what works for them.”

Holistic medicine focuses on healing mind, body, spirit as opposed to Western medicine that focuses on curing the physical body, she said.

“I’m glad I chose nursing. I’m not stuck. You can get stagnant if you don’t grow. I like to help people recover and rehabilitate. Rehabilitation is just a door to help people.

“Life in constantly renewing, recovering, rediscovery,” she said. “Health is ongoing, you have to work at it.”