Caring encounters.

This paper is based on conversations the author had with six nurses about their experiences of caring when working with cardiac patients. The text is orientated to elucidating the lived experience of caring so as to provide new possibilities for understanding, and to raising questions for the sake of opening up different perspectives on the nature of caring. Six themes emerge from the experiential descriptions: Sensing the patient's vulnerability: beyond the call of duty; being in tune with the patient's world; being attentively present; centring on the patient; and being comfortable with the patient. Pseudonyms are used so as to maintain anonymity of the nurses and their patients. The female pronoun is used throughout the paper because all the nurses interviewed were females.