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Life and Death in 12 Hours

— ICU nurse Christin Thankachan on providing comfort during life's darkest moments

Ƶ MedicalToday

"The Doctor's Art" is a weekly podcast that explores what makes medicine meaningful, featuring profiles and stories from clinicians, patients, educators, leaders, and others working in healthcare. Listen and subscribe on , , Amazon, , , and .

For all the crucial work physicians do in the hospital, no one spends more time with hospitalized patients than nurses. This is especially true in the intensive care unit, where nurses serve as patients' conduits with their medical team and perhaps even with the outside world.

Joining Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson, MD, in this episode is , an ICU nurse at Stanford Health Care who cares for the most seriously ill cancer patients in the hospital. Over the course of our stirring conversation, we ask her to reflect on how she guides patients and their families with a comforting and compassionate hand through life's darkest moments. In addition, Thankachan shares the unique challenges she has faced as a frontline worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how she has maintained hope and meaning through these trying times.

In this episode, you will hear about:

  • 2:06 How Hurricane Sandy pushed Thankachan towards a career in nursing
  • 5:13 The differences between a nurse's responsibilities in an intensive care unit and a medical/surgical unit
  • 7:26 What a typical day is like for an ICU nurse
  • 10:22 How Thankachan finds the physical, emotional, and psychological stamina to care for some of the sickest patients in the hospital
  • 13:49 The kinds of relationships Thankachan forms with her patients and how she strives to elevate the human connection
  • 21:16 The importance Thankachan places on recognizing the fullness of humanity within each patient
  • 31:50 The power of hope for patients facing serious illnesses
  • 36:38 What it was like to serve as a frontline worker in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic
  • 40:47 Advice on how to stay connected to the most meaningful aspects of the healthcare profession, even in the darkest times

Following is a partial transcript (note errors are possible):

Johnson: This is Tyler and Henry, and we are really grateful today to welcome Christin Thankachan. Did I get close?

Thankachan: Sure.

Johnson: Why don't you say your name right, so we get it right up here?

Thankachan: Christin Thankachan.

Johnson: There we go. And she is an ICU nurse at the Stanford Medical ICU. Some of you may remember back to one of our very early episodes where we who is a medical ICU doctor at Stanford. And we recognized a little bit back, actually, that we had never interviewed a nurse, which is a horrible oversight, frankly, on our part.

And so we asked if she could recommend a nurse that we could talk to. And Christin's was the name that came in. And so we are really grateful to you, Christin, for being here. And you can just walk us through what is your experience as a nurse? Like, where have you worked for how long and what capacities? And just kind of walk us through that a little bit.

Thankachan: Sure. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Appreciate being here. So I was not destined to be a nurse. My mother is a nurse. I come from a family of healthcare humans and thought I wanted to be an attorney and do international justice.

So I did not always anticipate being a nurse, but I worked for a nonprofit in New York City back in 2008, and eventually that led to some disaster management work. And during Hurricane Sandy, I was on the disaster preparedness team and Hurricane Sandy actually turned into a disaster. ... I was in charge of creating programs for people without access. So that population happened to be oncology patients. So I was doing food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters for patients during Hurricane Sandy that ended up in a partnership with Sloan [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center], all the five major cancer centers in New York City, and ended up working with a team of amazing nurses that were also working this disaster. We were 4 months out in the field, and even though my mother's a nurse, I was so taken aback by these nurses and decided to go to nursing school and said, I want to go into oncology.

I want to make sure that these patients get the care they need because what I saw was, under-prepared, missed by the patients. And it was heartbreaking to see patients with cancer who didn't have food, electricity, and water during a disaster. They were hard to reach. They didn't want to go to a shelter, they're immunocompromised and vulnerable, and to create programs that better access them, I was like, I just need to get there. And so I thought being a nurse was going to be the way that I did that. And then that led me to nursing as a second career.

I did contract work with Sloan, worked at two major hospitals in New Jersey, and then when he moved out here, I said -- and that was in 2020 -- we moved out here. I said, oh, I have two little kids. If I'm going to work full-time, it's going to be because there's a specialty oncology ICU at Stanford. And if you put it into the universe, it comes back to you. And sure enough, there was an oncology ICU at Stanford. And that's how I started here, because I love the population and love the acuity.

For the full transcript, visit .

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