Embracing Mortality: How Nurses Can Live Authentically

Welcome to Club Nurse.

I'm Colton Lord, your host. By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now let's dive into today's conversation.

Hello everybody, welcome back to Club Nurse. This is Colton Lord, your host of this podcast. I know that I have been a little bit MIA the last couple weeks. I don't know if you really know that. We've still been producing some episodes, may have missed a week or two, but just a little life update if you care. I just left Boston. I did. I'm very sad about it, but I am kind of in this in-between stage in my life. I'm down at my sister's house in Tennessee. I just got my remote setup working. Internet is good to go, so I will start working at my remote job here shortly. But that's not what this episode is going to be about. I'm not going to bore you to death with my life. I wanted to get on here. It is going to be a quick little episode with building and creating Club Nurse. I really wanted to make sure we also emphasize the importance of just mental health and what that means as a nurse and in this profession. So today is going to be a little bit about that, a little bit of mental health. centered around mental health and just an idea that I had popped into my head over this last weekend through an event that I was at. I don't know if I should call that an event. I was at a funeral. Do you call that an event? I don't know. Here we are calling it an event. I had flown to Arizona. We had some last-minute changes in our schedule. My grandfather passed away, so went to his funeral. And while I was there, I think funerals do this. I think this is kind of a normal thing. You know, just gets you reflecting, gets you looking at your own life and thinking, am I living the life that I wanna live? You know, when you're looking at a dead body in a casket, it just gets you, gets the wheels turning in your brain, you know what I mean? So yeah, as I was looking at my grandfather in his open casket at his viewing, I just thought to myself, you know, wonder if he lived the life that he wanted to. I think he did, based on what I know about him and his life. It seemed like he lived the life that he really wanted to live, but I never had that conversation with him, so I actually, I don't know the answer to that. And it got me thinking, and I was just on another podcast, uh, today actually as a guest, and we were talking about this idea that of nursing not being our first priority, our passion, our plan A, if you will. I know that there is a creator, Lindsay Shelton, Scrub Hacks. I've mentioned her before actually on this podcast, saying how nursing is her plan B. And I love that idea. I love that concept. I'll keep repeating it forever and ever because I feel the same way. I never felt like Being a nurse was my passion in life, that this was like my end-all goal. And I think that goes for a lot of people. And if it is, if nursing was the pinnacle of the peak and this is where you wanted and you are there, embrace that. There's nothing wrong with that. And I'm here to say that. Uh, but for me, it was not ever my passion. I like being a nurse. There's things that I do like about it. There's things that I really don't like about it, but overall, I'm so grateful for the profession. I'm thankful that I've landed here and for the opportunities that it has granted me. So that's not lost on me at all. Um, but we were talking about this concept of it not being our first priority and basically planning our entire life around it. And so I wanted to just share that with you today, that you can be a good nurse even if it's not your life passion. And I think in this profession, we see death so much, depending on what specialty you work in, maybe more, you may see it more than somebody else, but still, we are faced with the idea of death and sickness and illness every day in our profession if we're working at the bedside, and even if we're not. Even if we're doing remote jobs, we just understand that on a deeper level than most people. And I think, I really think that that is a benefit. I think that, that you have a leg up if you are a nurse. If you work in healthcare, you have a leg up on people with a perspective that a lot of people will never get because they don't understand it. They're not seeing it every day. Every single person in the world, I think, knows that they're going to die unless they're delulu, but We're all going to, right? We all know that. We may not talk about it, but we know that. But as a nurse, we really know that. We see it. We see the fragility of life. We understand that we are not all given and granted 100 years. We understand that we can wake up tomorrow and our lives could be forever changed by a diagnosis, by cancer or whatever that may be. We understand that it does not discriminate based on your age. And I'm telling you, that's an advantage. And that is such an advantage. You need to understand this. You need to hear this. You need to use that concept and run with it because you seeing that, you dealing with death, you zipping up a body bag, you seeing that trauma day in and day out, you dealing with those sick babies in the NICU every single day, you working on that oncology unit and infusing chemotherapy into the 30-year-old mom of 4, you understand at a deep level if you allow yourself to acknowledge it. And I think that we can really take our death, our mortality, and we can use that as a guiding light If you will, you know, to kind of put ourselves there, put ourselves at that moment of our death or that moment of being sick or that moment of that diagnosis. And we can use that as fuel to how we want to live our life today. And I know that may sound woo-woo, that may sound weird or crazy to you, but I really think that's the truth. I think that we have this huge advantage in life because of the perspective that we have. And if you look at it the right way, you really can take that and run with it. And I'm here to tell you that you don't have to be— stay as a nurse and work as a nurse your whole life to understand that. Even if you're a new grad nurse or you've just been in nursing school or you're a CNA, you still are seeing it.

You're—

you understand that concept. And so I encourage you to take that and, you know, put yourself there. Put yourself on your deathbed, and it might sound really weird, but put yourself there and look back and be like, oh, How do I want to live my life? And is this job, is this career, is it doing it for me? And the answer may be yes, it may be no. But the beauty with being a nurse is you have so many transferable skills. And I think one of my favorite things about being a nurse is the flexibility that it offers me to do other things, make other decisions. I don't have to go to work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. Like, I have so much more time in my week if I allow myself to. I may be more tired, but I do have that time to kind of seek out other ventures. And we need to normalize And we need to, we need to be as nurses more okay with nursing not being our whole life or nursing not being our only profession or nursing not being our priority. When you're working, when you're on the clock, yes, those patients deserve your full attention. They deserve the best that you can possibly give to them. And that is very important. And I have been at points in my career where I didn't feel like I was giving that to my patients and I had to take a step back. And what I'm, what I'm getting to is you have an advantage. Use that advantage as a nurse. You have time management, you have people skills. Hello. Problem solving, critical thinking. These skills are transferable to other areas of your life. I promise you. Okay? You do not have to only be a nurse. You can if you want, but you don't have to be.

So curate.

Create a life that works for you. I can't reiterate this enough. I told you this would be a short episode. I just wanted to get on here and just give you a little bit of encouragement. Maybe boost your mental health a little bit. I want to be really honest with you. I have really been looking inward. I have been taking inventory of my own life and the way that I've been living and the things that I've been doing and the direction. that I've been going. And I've really just been sitting with that. I have really not been on social media. And if you've been following my journey at all over the last couple years, I have been on social media every single day for close to 2 years. And over the last month, I really— I've really not been on there. I just haven't. And that's okay. You know, sometimes we need to take that time to really go deep and reflect and ask ourselves What's next and are we actually going the direction that we want to go? And so that's really the message I wanted to give to you today. I know this is super short. I don't have a whole lot to say. We are gonna be having some more guests on. I'm super, super excited. Life got a little crazy, all right? Like I told you, I moved. My grandpa passed away last second, so I had to get to Arizona. So I'm just being real honest with you. I just, I bit off more than I can chew. I didn't have a whole lot of time. I wasn't fully prepared. I should have been ahead a little bit on some episodes, but I wasn't, and that's okay. That's life and we are learning.

I am learning.

When I say we, I mean I. I am learning to be more gracious with myself. Thank you, therapy. You know, this is a learning process. This is all a learning process and we're learning as we go. So that's it for you today. Let's just kind of wrap it back up, sum it up a little bit. I told you I went to a funeral in Arizona. I was looking at my grandpa dead in his casket and just had that thought of, wow, wonder if he liked the life he lived. Wonder if he wished he did something else, had a different job. Had lived somewhere else. And I think that those moments are really important for us to reflect upon. And so I wanted to offer that to you if you needed a reminder or a moment to kind of reflect on your own life and ask yourself, is this what I want to be doing? You know, this is your time. And as a nurse, you have so many options. I just hope you can see that. I know that all of our situations are very unique in the sense of we all have different dynamics as far as kids or people who are depending on us or bills that we have to pay. I am sensitive to that and I understand that, but I I just want you to know that when you are on your deathbed and you are dying and it is your last and final days on this physical earth, I can almost guarantee that version of you is not going to care about these things, these excuses that you keep having as to why you can't live the life that you wanna live. And that's just my opinion. I think that's the truth. I've talked to too many people in the hospital. I've read a lot of things about people at the end of their lives. And I'm just telling you, These things that you are worried about right now, when you are dying, they are not going to matter. What's really going to matter is the life that you lived and how true and authentic you were to yourself and those around you. So don't take any of that to the grave is what I'm trying to say. Do it now while you're still here and while you have time, because time is our most precious commodity. Is that what they say? Our most precious commodity? Words, words are hard today. I'm hungry. All right. That's really it this week on Club Nurse. Thank you so much for being here. And stay tuned, we're going to get some more guests that have some awesome information for you, awesome perspectives, awesome stories, and just people who are doing really cool things in healthcare and nursing and in the world. Okay, uh, that's it. Again, my name is Colton, this is Club Nurse, and we'll see you next time.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse. I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this with someone that you love. Follow me on socials @NurseDaddies or ColtonLord17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else. Love ya, bye!