Defining Moments: A Nurse's Touch.

In most cultures, touch is the sense we most strongly associate with healing. In this essay, I describe the different ways touch was incorporated into my cancer treatment as well as wonder how touch in the clinical setting might remain changed as the result of COVID-19. More specifically, I narrate my clinical relationship with my oncology nurses and the role of instrumental and empathic touch over the course of six months of treatment and two years of follow-up. Touch in the nurse-patient relationship is necessary, multi-faceted, complicated, and, in the face of a pandemic, amended.