Research Paper on:
Case Study in Nursing: The Terminally Ill Patient

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
children, ages 5 and 8, who had been perviously diagnosed with cancer. She is admitted to the hospital from time to time, but her disease is generally controlled with  drug therapy for the most part. She is rather well liked by the staff who regard her as pleasant, intelligent and sensitive. Mrs. Borelli has just been admitted  to treat a bout of pneumonia. After a few days, she is placed in protective isolation in a single room near the nurses station, and she has become morose. She  is no longer friendly with the staff and will only give short answers when queried. The nurses are concerned. Many nurses believe that Mrs. Borelli knows she is near death  but does not want to talk about it. How might a nurse treat this patient? Two groundbreaking works, Awareness of Dying and Time for Dying was published in  1965 and 1968 respectively, by sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss who describe patients responses to the news that they are dying as something akin to depression (Robertson, 1999). The  depression would then be followed by a struggle between denial and acceptance (1999). This model includes all the emotions of the Kubler-Ross paradigm but without the fantasy that acceptance is  the ultimate outcome. In treating this patient, a student writing on the subject might want to consider that the depression is a normal part of having a terminal illness and  that the nurse must be sensitive to this expected progression. Still, how would a nurse treat this patient who has a terminal illness and appears to be severely depressed? First,  it is important to evaluate the use of both verbal and nonverbal communication techniques. One study finds that some forms of therapeutic touch had increased the well-being of 20