Commentary on Lohne V & Severinsson E (2005) Patients’ experiences of hope and suffering during the first year following acute spinal cord injury. Journal of Clinical Nursing 14, 285–293

Abstract

I read with particular interest this article and commend the authors for their investigation into a particularly challenging and emotive clinical issue. The author’s findings were particularly enlightening for me because they match, to a large extent, my personal experiences of working in this discipline – some 15 years ago – and the issues that I encountered with spinal-injured clients. To me, it is obvious why this is the case. The issues and challenges that face spinal-injured patients are little different today than they were then. The technology may be significantly improved, but the dilemmas of prognosis and rehabilitation for this client group remain relatively unchanged and challenging. On a personal level, I was surprised to see that the findings of Lohne and Severinsson’s (2005) study did not explicitly unearth issues related to ‘finding meaning or connectedness’ for and in relation to the injury suffered by the participating clients. An overarching memory of mine was the perpetual quest, of a significant proportion of the patients I encountered, to ‘make sense’ of their injury and their experiences and their personal struggle to come to terms with their condition – what I would refer to as their existential quest. I have tried in the literature to define what I mean by existential health states in patients and how they relate to a number of interchangeable factors – namely a state whereby an individual seeks to place their illness in the context of who they are and what they might do and why, a search for meaning in the context of how their illness connects and coexists with their world, and an awareness of self and selfunderstanding as it applies to their altered health state (Whitehead 2003, p. 680): In essence, an existential experience is a manifestation and an attempt at an awareness of being.