The Stages of Grief

When a person suffering from a loss, they will experience grief. This is one of the main subtopic in my Principles and Practices of Nurses 2.

We learn this to improve methods of communicating with the patient, who experiences a great loss, such as loss of body parts, suffers from a terminal ill, who suffers from infertility, gets a divorce, has drug addiction and many many more that you can list it as a loss. Besides, we also have to know the skills to commmunicate with the patient's family members, regarding the death of loved one or other loss.

There are 5 stages according to Ross.

STAGES OF GRIEF - KUBLER ROSS
1. Denial - disbelief
2. Anger - to self or others
3. Bargaining - wish to compensate for a replacement
4. Depression - understand but silent
5. Acceptance - emotion stable

According to Ross, most of the ppl will go through all the stages but some may go through certain stages out of all or maybe not in the sequence written above.

Today, I've encounter one person who go through the first four stages but not yet reach Acceptance. She is a very very sentimental type of person, love to collect movie tickets, presents received and memorable photo. She loves to capture pictures and view them everytime when she feels like want to view. Normally, youngsters switch on the laptop for the net, games but she listens to music and views pictures only. This shows how much she precious the photos.

Last week, she just came back from a vacation in Surabaya, Indonesia. Before that, she purposely buy a 3.2MP camera phone for a device to capture nice photos with friends during vacation but today she deleted all the photos (total 130+) accidently due to overspeed of pressing the phone buttons.

Denial
She was so shock of the disappearance of all the photos. She checked and checked, searched and searched all the files in the phone, asking friend to help to search the photos deleted but failed. All has gone, never come back.

Depression
She wanted to be alone with friend staying away from her. She cried and cried, even when she is ironing her uniform. Her tears were dripping onto her uniform.

Anger
She hated herself so much until the level that she felt like want to chop down her own hands. Angry that why she pressed so fast and deleted all the photos. She scolded herself.

Bargaining
Then, she came to the bargaining stage, which she said that:" No mather how expensive it cost to restore back the photos, I will pay it." She wanted to replace them with something else.

Depression (again)
She locked herself without friend disturbing in the room and she cried for another one hour until the eyes were so swollen. She was so tired until slept away.

Denial (again)
She woke up and wished that was just a bad dream. She checked her phone again, hoping all photos are there but it is a reality.

Slight Acceptance
I came back from my afternoon shift, she described the whole process from the very beginning till now. She was trying very very hard to accept it but part of her brain still hoping for a miracle to happen.

Hope she will recover soon.