There are no coincidences. Only a month ago I emailed Kim at Emergiblog with a blogging question. She forwarded the email to her “web guy” Shane. As we say in New Jersey, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, I know a guy.” Shane emails me back to say he’s been looking for me. And so this column was born.

Why nursing ethics? As a transplant coordinator, ethics comes up quite a bit. Organ donation has been in the news a lot recently, from a prisoner in Washington State getting a liver to the new push for donation after cardiac death. That’s just one job. As nurses, we deal with ethical decisions every day. End of life decisions, informed consent, even staffing can all be seen as ethical issues. Probably the most important, ethical action we take is by being patient advocates. Helping patients to know their rights and make the best choices for their health is integral to the nursing process. In this vein, the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health has a grass roots campaign to have the United Nations declare 2010 The International Year of the Nurse and 2011-2020 the UN Decade for a Healthy World. The nursing shortage is hitting the entire planet and although it affects us here in the U.S. we have to remember that recruiting nurses from developing countries leaves those underserved populations with a nursing shortage as well. Make your voice heard and bring the importance of nurses to the world’s attention.

So why “Penlight”? I’m a big fan of author Robert Fulghum, the guy who wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. In one of his books he writes about attending a peace conference where a speaker talked about his experience in a Nazi prison camp. He had been fighting with the Greek Resistance and when captured was thrown into a small, dark cell for many years. At the end of his talk, he asked if there were any questions and, rather glibly, Mr. Fulghum asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” And in response he got an answer that I have adopted as my own personal philosophy. The man said that his small cell only had one little window, way up high. One day he found a broken sliver of mirror. To pass the time he started reflecting the light around the cell. Shortly it became a game to find the smallest, darkest recesses of the cell with the light. Then he looked at Fulghum and said, “You are the mirror.” And so it is with me. I want to shine a light into the darkness. Or as Parliament Funkadelic sang, “Everybody needs a little light.”

So I thought about calling the column “Mirror” or “Flashlight” or some such, but hey, I’m a nurse. I don’t carry a mirror. But I do carry a penlight.