In this interview segment, ER nurse Jennifer Johnson describes the pivotal moment when the COVID‑19 pandemic forced her to confront her own mortality and question the trajectory of her career. Faced with the possibility of dying, she wondered what legacy she would leave for her young children. Initially intending to write comforting bedtime stories for them, the intense stress and trauma of the pandemic broke through her emotional barriers, causing painful memories to surface and flood onto the page. Johnson realized the stories had become far more than simple tales for her kids; many were raw, unsettling experiences she never wanted her children to hear. This realization marked a shift from a comfortable, duty‑driven nursing role toward a deeper, purpose‑driven mission to share these hidden narratives and explore nursing intuition.
So, so you're going, you're cracking along in your, the career that you fell into. And what was the moment where even that trajectory changed into what you're focusing on now? You're still working in the emergency room. Yes. But what was that thing that made everything different from one day to the next when you're like, oh, I have to, I have to talk about this, like that I'm pregnant with something?
Yeah.
Kind of passion that comes with an aha like that.
Yeah, COVID. You know, there is something so profoundly sad and beautiful about being broken down to the point where you don't know who you are, what you're doing, what's going to happen in the next day. Your, your own mortality is staring you straight in the face, and you go, okay, so if I was to, to die tomorrow, what would I want to leave behind? And it's like, well, The book started as just stories for my kids. So when COVID started, and again, we taped this on the anniversary, the 5-year anniversary of everything being locked down originally. And, you know, everything started out as like, well, you know, I'm choosing to continue to go to work. That's my— that's where I feel I'm needed and that's what's comfortable and that's just the easiest option. And so, you know, if I was to get sick, if I was not to make it, How would you explain to a 4 and 5-year-old that mom chose to continue to go to work?
Wow.
And so sitting down originally trying to write out the good stories and, you know, you get a couple out and you're like, okay, those are, those are the nice stories. And very quickly the traumatic stuff that I'd pushed down, you know, I didn't have the effort to keep down anymore. And all of that came up and just spewed out and In sitting back after everything was kind of out and I said, okay, well, what is this all about? What is going on? This is more than just stories for my kids now, because half these stories I don't want my kids to ever hear. Yeah.
And, and just to be clear, so this is spewing out of you onto a page.
This is onto a page, 6 weeks of writing. I don't remember writing the book. I don't remember. I remember getting up really, really early. I remember staying up really, really late. I remember taking every moment. that I had to myself to write, but I don't remember writing it. And again, I was horrifically sleep deprived. You know, we didn't have any daycare for the kids, so I was up all day, up all night working, and, and it was just a gong show. Burnt out to, to the absolute crispiest that you could possibly be. And, uh, Llewellyn, who was a metaphysical book publisher in the States at the time, was having online book fairs about their authors. And, and so, you know, your author would come on, you'd have a little spiel about the book and on. And one of the— I think one of the only ones that I actually caught was intuition at work. And I remember listening to it and going like, intuition at work? I use my intuition all the time at work. And it was just this huge light bulb that was just like lightning bolt.
