Chapter 4: A Master’s Program Leads to Oncology and to an Interest in Pain Management
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Description
Dr. Summers talks about the impact of her Master’s program on her nursing practice and her vision of her nursing career. She discusses her commitment to oncology nursing and providing “high intensity critical care” to patients and family members.
She sketches her work history and the impact of working in a chronic pain clinic (not related to oncology). She explains social attitudes toward pain and notes her own subspecialty interest in pain and pain management. She tells a story about successfully using multi-modality interventions to treat an oysterman who was very injured and couldn’t work.
Identifier
SummersB_01_20140123_C04
Publication Date
1-23-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Barbara Summers, PhD, Oral History Interview, January 23, 2014
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational PathProfessional Path Mentoring Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine Influences from People and Life Experiences Human Stories Offering Care, Compassion, Help Patients, Treatment, and Survivors Patients
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Barbara Summers, PhD:
So I did; I enrolled in a master’s degree program back at George Mason University, and I decided that I wanted to focus in oncology because I had had the opportunity to care for a number of oncology patients in the hospital.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was going to ask you how you decided to focus on oncology. What were some of the key moments that made you think, “Yeah, this is where I’m going to focus my energy”?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
It was the experience as caring for individual patients who had cancer diagnoses, and the realization that I love the relationships that you have with a patient over time when you get to know a patient and their family and you know their story, and you’re a part of their life for a period of time. But I also loved the intensity of critical care. And oncology is one of the only specialties where you get to combine both the high-intensity clinical care needs of patients who are very complexly ill, use a lot of your critical-thinking skills, along with building a sustained relationship with a patient and family over a continuum because it is a chronic disease, in most cases, and you’re going to see the same people over and over again. So it gave me acuity and chronicity all in the same category of disease. So it challenged me intellectually. It fulfilled me on a psychological and spiritual basis. It was just like the perfect thing. I can’t imagine why anyone would do anything else still to this day. So I enrolled in an MSN program at George Mason University to become a clinical nurse specialist in oncology. I worked for a bit longer in the ICU, but then my manager, Ann, connected me with a group of physicians who were opening up a pain clinic, and they needed a nurse to run their pain clinic, and I thought that would be a gas, because I was interested in pain management. I learned a tremendous amount. It was a pain clinic that was specifically opened to address chronic pain needs of patients. So I worked with two brilliant anesthesiologists and two—actually three extraordinary clinical psychologists. So I would work with the anesthesiologists when they were doing interventions for pain, nerve blocks, etc. I would also participate in the group therapy sessions that we would have with the psychologists with the patients, and I came to develop an understanding of the complexity of pain and the different manifestations of pain, and had my eyes opened up to the fact that society has a tendency to like to label people in general, but particularly individuals with chronic pain problems. Society likes to label them as malingerers when, in fact, the pain that they’re experiencing is quite real. And while I may not be able to quantify it scientifically, it doesn’t in any way diminish the reality of pain for the patient. So I developed a kind of a subspecialty interest in pain and pain management and began studying the work of Marie Manthey, who was one of the nursing pioneers in pain management and who put forward the statement that pain is whatever the patient says it is, wherever the patient says it is, and whenever the patient says it is, and really adopted that as my operating philosophy for working with patients in pain.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, I assume that at this clinic you saw wide array of patients, not just patients with cancer issues.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
No, and actually, most of the patients did not have cancer. Many of them were individuals with occupational injuries. I remember very vividly, because the Washington, D.C. area is very close to the Chesapeake Bay, and we had a client who was an oysterman, and at that time and even today oystermen will harvest oysters by taking these giant tongs that have handles that are probably fifteen feet long and the tongs are probably, I don’t know, five to seven feet long, and they open them up like, you know, tongs you would use on your barbecue grill. But they open the tongs up, plunge them in the water down to the bottom of the bed of the Bay, and then using incredible upper-body strength, close the tongs by pulling them apart, and then lift that up, and the oysters are going to be in there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And they’re heavy.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Very heavy. And so this man had sustained significant injury from a muscle tear that caused him chronic pain that was very difficult to be relieved. So he’d had a surgical repair of the muscle, but he developed scar tissue afterwards and was just in chronic pain, and so he was an individual who really benefited from multi-modality approach to his pain. The anesthesiologist would do nerve blocks. We would meet with him in the group therapy sessions. One of the anesthesiologists was also a hypnotist and would use hypnosis with him. And so we were able to work with him to get him back to a place where he was able to be employed again. He could no longer use the tongs, but he could drive the boat and be a part of the harvesting of the oysters. So that was just a very—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Saved his livelihood.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Yes. It was very impactful for me to see that. And I held that position, worked for a nurse agency doing critical care work around the hospitals in the Washington metropolitan area.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And this was about what year?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
I don’t know, ’79 to ’81.
Recommended Citation
Summers, Barbara PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 4: A Master’s Program Leads to Oncology and to an Interest in Pain Management" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1241.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1241
Conditions Governing Access
Open
