title: Being altered by the unexpected: understanding the perioperative patient's experience: a case study.
abstract: The present paper focuses on the process of understanding the patient in the context of perioperative caring and reports a story narrated by a perioperative nurse as well as her emerging understanding of the patient prior to surgery at an operating department. This qualitative case study had a dual purpose; firstly, to describe how the perioperative nurse's understanding of the patient emerged and, secondly, to establish how the researcher interpreted the situation. As a perioperative nurse and researcher, the author is both the narrator and interpreter. To date we have rarely discussed the fact that, in a perioperative context, the patient might feel ashamed of his/her body, even before arriving at the operating department. This new understanding emerged from the hermeneutical dialogue in the present study.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nursing, Health and Culture, University West, Trollhättan, Sweden.
authors.forename: Gudrun
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rudolfsson
mesh_terms: D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D019990:Perioperative Care / Q000451:nursing*; D013315:Stress, Psychological
keywords: being altered; hermeneutics; perioperative caring; shame; single case study