I became a nurse because I already knew what it meant to survive.

THE STORY

I didn’t come to nursing through a calling. I came through survival.

I went to nursing school at 30, a little later than most, on purpose or otherwise. By then I had already survived things that most people only read about. I didn’t come out of that fragile, weak, or insecure; none of us survivors are anything but the strongest. It made me fluent in humanity at its lowest points. I could sit with suffering without flinching because I knew it. When your Maslow’s level is barely breathing.

I spent nearly a decade in critical care and emergency medicine. Then the pandemic arrived. I became a frontline pandemic nurse, commuting over 300 miles a week for two years. What we survived during that time was surreal and starkly terrifying. I was injured in a traumatic COVID code near the end of my time as a frontliner. I walked away with PTSD and a deep anger about the erasure of what was happening, had BEEN happening, to us nurses inside healthcare for decades. Stay silent, be dismissed, above all keep working.

In the middle of all of it during my graduate semester in 2020, I chose nurses as my research population. I told myself I was taking the easy route. What I was really doing was trying to find out if other nurses were as broken as I was.

So I built a research survey. Thousands of nurses responded. What I read changed my life forever. Nurses were hurting, struggling, burning out, and being deeply impacted by systems and cultural norms designed to treat them like productivity quotas instead of the brilliant, compassionate clinicians that show up 24 hours a day 7 days a week around the world to care for humanity.

We were trained to stay silent. To be selfless to the point of ruin. To never under any circumstances admit that our careers were destroying us from the inside out. The data confirmed what I already knew in my body: nursing trauma is real, it is systemic, and nobody was doing anything about it that actually worked.