Ineffective Individual Coping on Whose Part?

He came to us around Thanksgiving, he was on death's door. Mr. Jones (not his real name of course) had been dealing with a congenital heart abnormality all his life, and now at age 50 something it was catching up with him. I remember the evening he came us. With his breathing and circulation were controlled by machines, it appeared that his only hope was a heart transplant.
After several days in intensive care, Mr. Jones recovered enough to breath on his own. His prognosis was starting to look a little better. It wasn't long, however, before he experienced another setback, a massive stroke, a major risk for patients with ventricular assist devices. By Christmas his brain function was very minimal. Even so, his wife Sue, faithfully sat his bedside. Because she wouldn't "pull the plug," some of the nurses had her pegged as "in denial" and gave her a nursing diagnosis of "ineffective individual coping."
I found myself as his assigned nurse on several occassions. On the days I wasn't too incredibly busy I chatted with Sue as I changed dressings and IV lines. I found out that she was a high school language arts teacher, that she was a mother of 3 young women, that she had met Mr. Jones while they attented college in Canada... I found Mrs. Jones to be a very pleasant woman with a great head on her shoulders who just happened to be going through a very difficult time.
Last week I was assigned to a different hall. I was charting and watching monitors when Mrs. Jones walked by. We greeted one another in passing and I asked how she was doing. She told she that she had decided to see a counselor as a way of taking care of herself so she would have someone to talk to. "I'm doing it to be fair for my girls. They are already greaving enough over their father, they don't need to worry about me too..."
She told me about how when she went to meet with the counselor, she noticed that the counselor seemed uneasy. "So basically you're greaving over your husband before he's even dead?" Mrs. Jones was a little surprised by this unexpected response from a "mental health professional" so responded to this remark by asking, "You don't like me, do you? Am I making you uncomfortable."
The counselor responded with this: "I don't like myself when I can't help people."
Wow, that really hit the nail on the head. It isn't Mrs. Jones who has the "ineffective individual coping."
"I'm trying to keep at least one foot in real life. I want to do what's best for my girls and those I have left," she said as we finished the conversation and parted ways.