The Olive You Podcast - Ep 10 - Jennifer Johnson - The Intuitive Nurse

The key is, you know, everybody copes differently and everybody— some people want to talk about it, some people do not want to talk about it, or they're not ready to talk about it. So it's really hard to kind of gauge where that line is. So it's like, so am I expecting it? Am I accepting it? Like, what is— like, so what is the point of you telling me this? Like, I don't understand. Try and remember the fear. Try and remember. Walking onto the floor for the first time. Try to remember how much, you know, how much effort it took to then come to somebody to ask for help. Try and remember being belittled by somebody else and like how that made you feel. So why are we continuing on? Like, we need to just— it needs to not happen anymore. It's completely crazy.

Okay. All right. Well, everybody, we are back at it. This is the All of You podcast where we sit down with all of you.

Before we begin today's episode, we are going to insert a quick trigger warning. We will be discussing topics related to severe mental health challenges, including suicidal ideation. We believe that it is imperative that we are able to talk about these things openly, even in a professional landscape. A 2024 survey by the Government of Canada states that every year, approximately 4,500 people die by suicide across the country. This is the equivalent to 12 people dying by suicide every single day. It goes without saying that our mental health does not miraculously improve the second we walk through the doors of our workplace. In fact, it might get worse. If you're struggling, we hope that this will let you see and hear that you are not alone. Do not struggle in silence. We strongly encourage you to reach out to a mental health professional through your local emergency department or contact a suicide prevention hotline. For those in Canada, that number is 1-833-456-4566 or text 45645. Olive Branch Mentorship Incorporated is a strong advocate or mental health support in the workplace. And the All Of You podcast is here to support those of you who are navigating through tough times at work, especially when it comes to keeping your shit together there. Your overall wellbeing matters to us. We hope you take something meaningful away from this episode. And as always, take care of yourself first.

And today we are extending the olive branch to Jennifer, RN, nurse extraordinaire, author, ghostwriter, Oh my goodness, I've been so excited for this episode. I just, I'm thrilled to have you here. I'm thrilled that you're in Galt where your parents live. Like, this is amazing.

This is like walking down memory lane, like coming back in. It's so funny.

Yes.

So, so funny. But yeah, it's unreal.

Nostalgia, right?

Nostalgia like 20 times over. It's so cool.

Amazing. And of course we've got Sham on the mic, the hostess with the mostest. She's always so good at keeping us on track and yapping away to make sure that we move on to the more important things that we've got to talk about when we go off on tangents. So I can't wait to open this episode up. How do you want to do this, Sham? You want to take it away and ask Jen some questions about who she is?

Yeah, we'll actually just start with kind of getting to know about you and what you do, where you work, stuff like that.

Yeah, so I'm an ER nurse. I've worked for 16 years kind of all over Southern Ontario, Northern Ontario hospitals, Big, small, otherwise, just kind of all over the place. Still at the bedside part-time, still in the ER, doing a little bit of agency work and playing— oh yeah, playing the, you know, this is what I'm finally being paid what I'm worth kind of moment.

Love that for you.

Thank you. It's very part-time. It's very kind of all over the place. And it's only, you know, can you pick up this one shift?

Okay.

Can you pick up this one shift? Okay. It's very hit or miss. It's kind of starting to dry up a little bit right now, which is—

Well, because organizations are— Having to not pay agency rates, and they're having to actually do what they can to support the employees that they do have to make sure that they're working the shifts that they should be working. Yes.

And fully, fully support also, because again, I'm on both sides.

Absolutely. How could you not be?

And so when I do go to a hospital and it's like, okay, who's gonna fill out the workload tonight, guys? And they're like, what?

You don't fill out workloads? No?

No, no, no. But I'm like, if I'm here or if agency staff is here, you need to fill out the workloads.

Oh, you have to fill out the workloads.

Sorry. Yes.

You're right. Because, Sham, do you guys have agency staff that come and work at where you work?

No, we have like other companies that take care of that, but we don't have any staff coming in working with us.

Oh, okay. Because like at St. Joe's, they are still bringing in agency staff specifically for the critical, critical units, right? Like ICU and emerg, because you have to have such a specific skill set for that.

And ratios and—

Ratio.

Actually, you know what, it almost sounds like we're talking to people who know everything about this, but we don't.

Um, sorry. Yeah, we have to like break it down because there are a lot of people who listen who— we're talking shop, I guess, right?

Yeah.

So we have to rein our talk shop in.

Yeah, like, uh, explain what is the difference between like being an agency staff versus actually being a full-timer I don't know, for example—

Permanent full-time nurse, TV, in an emerg. Yeah, yeah.

So staff, like hospital's own staff, so somebody the hospital has hired, hospital— you've gone through the hospital orientation, you're— if you're full-time or part-time, you know, you're getting benefits paid through the hospital, you're their core staff, you're their— you know, you've signed on to one unit, you work your—

Portfolio.

Yeah, you've worked your unit, you know the ins and outs of what's going on, you know your management, you know who to call in case of a sick call, you know kind of all of the little niggly things that it takes a lot of time to learn. If you're coming in as an agency staff, you are just filling a minute-long hole, right?

Okay.

So you are being hired from an outside contractor to say— and this outside contractor says, hey, I've got 5 ER nurses, here's what they've got going on. You know, how many— oh, you just need a hole filled for tonight? Okay, we'll put out the calls to our agency staff tonight because the hospital has already exhausted calling in their own staff and nobody's coming in. They've called, they've called, they've called, not coming in. Okay, that's fine. Now you can call the agency staff. They'll put out an email to us and you have to be on it. Like, you have to reply back in like moments from getting that email to be like, yes, I'm on, I'm free tonight, yes. Okay, okay, okay. Because it's very much with coming in just shift by shift, it's a very last-minute going in.

Okay, coverage.

Very last minute.

So do they call agency staff before before they offer overtime, or do they have to offer overtime and exhaust all overtime and then offer agency?

I— from my understanding, that's the play, right? But again, a lot of nurses, even at overtime, are like, you know what, I'm done. Like, I've put in my time. Especially the full-timers, right? You're there typically 2 days, 2 nights, 5 off.

Yeah.

And it's a lot depending on your unit, you know, especially if the unit's been exceedingly heavy over the last little while. People are gonna go, you know what, I'm just gonna do my time and I'm gonna get out.

Yeah.

I don't care if you're going to pay me time and a half. I'm done. I'm already—

Well, not only that, but every year at the beginning of the semester, especially for my leadership courses, I'll ask the students, do you know what the Sunshine List is? And they'll be like, no, what's the Sunshine List? And I pulled it up in class last week, 2023, and the most RNs I've ever seen. And like, hallelujah. Hallelujah. I'm glad that there are RNs on the Sunshine List finally. In some cases making more than clinical directors.

Yes.

But not at any expense to yourself, because the way that that happened is working double time, 16-hour shifts, 12 shifts in a row, you know, sacrificing spending time with your family. And then there comes a point in time when you've made so much money in a pay period, if you pick up another shift or even another second, all of that money goes directly to your taxes. So you're essentially working for free.

Yes.

So if somebody wasn't— say a new nurse is like, man, I'm picking up all these hours. She goes to sit down with her accountant in, you know, March or whatever, and the accountant's like, you owe $10,000 in income tax because you're not taxed the right way when you work those kinds of insane shift rotations.

Yeah.

But what prompted— like, why would somebody go on for agency staff when your shifts are so How do you say, like barely there?

The shifts are so—

Scarcely.

How would you describe it, I guess? Like some shifts are more preferable than others, or if there's like a nice weekend coming up and you just know that it's Mother's Day is one of the worst weekends for sick calls, or Halloween, or Christmas. Yeah, like you can kind of predict what shifts are gonna— you're inevitably going to have sick calls for. So I'll let Jen take this to describe like why a nurse would choose to go into agency because I can see both sides of the coin. I can see both.

Yeah, so agency, you're getting paid at least twice what you're making as staff.

Yeah.

And that's take-home, in-pocket, you know, anywhere from $60 to $80 to $105 to $110 an hour.

Yeah, I've heard.

in pocket. And that's not even what the agency is actually taking home, because the agency obviously is taking home a portion.

Yeah.

To be able to say, oh well, we've provided you this very accomplished accredited staff, which is great. You just have to be careful then again with taxes as a— so now I'm my own business owner because—

Yes.

Now I have to deduct, you know, mileage and my home office and my cell phone and my gas and my insurance. And like, you can So the game is taking off as much as you can, because last year alone I pulled in $50,000.

Just from agents?

Just from agents, and very sporadic.

So do you list yourself, like, do you file yourself as a business? Like a consultant, I guess, is how you would list yourself, like a sole proprietor consultant?

Yep.

Awesome.

Tell us more about that. Like, what is the business name?

So the business originally started out as a nurse in the family, which was supposed to— during COVID when nobody— when everybody was scared to come into the ER, people, whoever was coming into the ER— so we went from seeing 50 to 60 patients in a day to like 10 to 15. So it was like you didn't kind of know what to do with yourself, and you had all this fear kind of overhanging. It was really, really— and then everybody was super thankful, which was like so odd on so many levels. And then, but those who were coming in were so much sicker than we were used to seeing. So people had put it off 5, 10 days when they should have come in a week ago. And a week ago it would have been just, here's some antibiotics, here's a water pill, here's some pain medication, okay, bye. Whereas now it's like, oh no, this is a full-on admit. It might even be an ICU-level admit. Like, you're sick.

Mm-hmm.

And we're having to really highly intervene. So with that, it was like, okay, well, had these people just had somebody to access to see them at home, do a full set of vitals, give them a once-over, field any questions, do some education, and then be able to then talk to— sorry, talk to their providers, right? So their family physician, any specialist, send out referral letters to be like, hey, I saw Mr. Smith today. He had XYZ complications. going on. Just giving you a heads up, you know, we talked about potentially going into the ER, but we're trying to avoid that, obviously, for many, many, many reasons. You know, here's the information. I'm a registered— like, I'm an ER nurse, I'm a staff nurse, I'm, you know, I know what I'm doing. So here's my assessment. Do with it what you will, but I'm updating you to try and keep you kind of in the loop and try and avoid anything further down the line.

Yeah.

Thankfully, unthankfully, Canadians don't wanna pay for healthcare.

Of course not. Everything is free, right?

Everything is free. So that really didn't go anywhere. But it did kind of lend me to like set up and buy the business name and get registered and do all the things, so that by the time I found agency, everything was already teed up, ready to rock and roll. So I was like, okay, this is easy enough. Just kind of sign the dotted line and off we go and running.

So that is, you know, 2 schools of thought in terms of how to be a nurse. You can work out of agency, you can be your own business. And then the alternative option— tell us about what it's like to be a part of a dynamic team in an emergency department. What are the perks and benefits to having a home base? Yeah, yeah.

So the agency work itself is very, very, very hit or miss. It's very much seasonal. Fourth quarter, forget about it. Just when I thought the shifts would be plentiful during Christmas and New Year's and all this kind of stuff dried up completely.

Wow.

So then I'm kind of left scrambling, going like, "I still have bills to pay. I've still got kids." Da da da. And so with then leaning back onto my staff job, which I don't think you can do agency without having a staff job unless you're doing. Long contracts where you're actually traveling. So the staff gig, you know, you are part of the team. You know who you're working with. You know the ins and outs. It's a very easy mental walk in, clock in, walk out, do your thing. Whereas agency, you know, you're lucky if you get one orientation shift. Then you have to set up like your OmniCell password and you get a badge and da da da. And so a lot of the times half the stuff isn't set up walking into that job.

So then you can't even document your entire shift.

And it's, you know, some places use Cerner, some places use Epic, some people are still paper charting, some people still have the bare bones Meditech that they're still relying on, like all these charting systems. And so thankfully I've got a fair amount of background with Epic and Meditech and paper charting.

It's funny because we're still on paper trail and inkjet. This just seems so archaic.

It's so funny, but we're still paper.

We're still, still.

There are so many places that are still paper, and like one of the courses I teach is Health Information Management Fundamentals, and I feel like I literally need to teach that entire scope because it doesn't matter where you end up. You could be doing paper charting here, or Cerner Epic, whatever there. Like, I don't think I can teach just one way of documentation because in every single area of the continuum, we're all sort of in this different transition period of paper to electronic. And then usually what I find in a lot of hospitals is maybe it will start paper in emerg, and then it transitions to you bring the paper chart up when the patient gets admitted, and then everything gets moved over to electronic then.

It's so weird. There's still a physical chart to hold and to love, and the physicians are still chicken scratch writing.

Oh yeah, where it's like undecipherable.

Like, man, I'm pretty good at this, but what is this?

I feel like I learned how to lose— how to learn reading physician handwriting when I was early on in my career, still in long-term care. I hadn't transitioned into acute care yet. I actually followed a psychiatrist for a year. He was a geriatric psychiatrist, and he handwrote every single one of his notes, and I had to transcribe all of his notes into the patient's chart. And when I tell you, like, I learned so well how to read, like—

I agree.

Hieroglyphics, because that was quite literally what it looked like half the time when I was reading his writing. And like, but then there are some risks associated with that. Like, what if you misinterpret what's been written? Even one small, you know, number reading a 3 as an 8 or a squig like a 6 as a whatever, a 0, you know, could— a critical event in, you know, medication dosage or something.

My biggest proposal was to start calligraphy hobbies for physicians. Learn how to write.

Oh my gosh, that's hilarious. That's hilarious.

No, but, uh, going back to like, let's just go back to basics basics. What made you want to be a nurse? Like, what was it that prompted it?

Uh, I never once ever thought I would be a nurse growing up.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I thought I wanted to be an accountant.

Oh my goodness, accounting to nursing. Like, they're not even in the same ballpark.

They're not even in the same realm. But thinking that, oh, I like numbers, and I like this, and I like that, and then did an accounting class in high school at GCI, just up the road.

It looks like the Harry Potter castle. It's so fun.

It's so much fun to just show people, this is where I went to high school. Oh, so on Twitch. Oh my gosh. Sidebar for later. But yeah, so going through this accounting class, You know, you're working through the little workbooks and you're like, oh, I do not have the attention span or the accuracy to detail for this.

No. Can I tell you, I failed grade 10 math twice. There's no way I would have been an accountant. And if you want me to do your accounting, you, you don't want me to do your accounting. Like, I'm struggling through it. Like, obviously starting a business, as you know, you have to maintain everything.

So bad.

For your accountant. And I'm like, look at all the paper on that table. You can see You see, right, just for those of you who are watching on video, right behind the camera, there's just a table full of papers and stuff that I have to go through and organize, but that's not my strong suit either. Not my strong suit at all.

Listen, figure out what you're willing to pay people to do.

Yeah, exactly.

100%.

I've been saying this a lot over the last few months, like, if I can't do it, I will pay you to do it. Listen, I'll just try first. You'll do it for me?

Well, listen. Aren't we already talking about ghostwriting?

Yes, we are. There's gonna be some sort of exchange of services.

Okay, I'm gonna take you ladies back.

This is why Sham has to be here because she reins me in. I'm like, da da da da da da da da da.

Listen, it's the undiagnosed ADHD.

Well, I am diagnosed.

You got diagnosed?

Very diagnosed. Yeah.

They told me it was just anxiety.

I'm just gonna talk to the camera now and say this is my third attempt to get them back.

Oh my goodness.

Okay, Sham.

Didn't wanna. Didn't ever, didn't really ever know any nurses growing up. Never really kind of thought about it.

Wow, you segued back into that nicely.

Oh, I have this much attention to detail. And so, you know, going to Lakehead University, so I was that 2-cohort class that came out all at the same time. So I was the younger half of that double cohort. So unless you had 90s, 95, you weren't getting in down here. You had to go up north to lovely last chance Lakehead. It's a loving term. I swear to God.

I think I did consider applying to Lakehead too, actually. I don't think I did, but—

She's a lot of fun.

Yeah.

But I went for biology because I was like, oh, biology, like, this will be a good segue. And got up to biology, did a year, was like, okay, this is pretty— this is alright. Second year, failed the first half of organic chemistry.

Oh.

Of course.

So, it was a year-long course, failed out, and I'm just going like, I've never failed anything before. Like, what do I do? I don't understand.

Yeah.

And so then, like, a girlfriend of mine who I'd known And in first year she was in nursing. And so we'd go through her textbooks. And so there's a Mosby's textbook that's got all the grossest pictures that you could ever imagine. I'm like, this is cool. I'm so worked up.

Let me look at that cadaver's toe. I can't wait to smell that.

They didn't include the smells. There should have been—

No smell-o-vision.

There should have been a smell-o-vision.

Yeah, just open this little box.

You gotta get smell-o-vision scratch-and-sniff stickers in those textbooks.

You wanna put— you wanna really test if somebody's cool to be a nurse?

Yeah.

C. diff.

Yeah, C. diff. I was gonna segue into C. diff, but I was waiting for you to take that.

GI bleed, you know.

Sham had a client with an infected wound and it had maggots in it, and I told her you have to get coffee grounds and— no, you don't do the coffee ground thing?

Kitty litter.

Kitty litter.

Kitty litter. So Cancer, when it breaks the skin, you will never unsmell that smell. It is so distinct that you just can't unsmell it.

So this is in your—

okay, for context, these ladies are talking about open body wounds that stink really bad and what they do to recover from that.

We give trigger warnings. We try. I'm really sorry. It's fine, it's fine.

But no, so I did a I used to do community care, so going into people's homes, and a lot of it was palliative care. And so there was one patient who had an open wound on her side, and it's like, oh, okay. And you're trying to keep very composed and do all this kind of stuff. And thankfully, smells for the most part don't really bother me. So I'm like, okay, 'cause apparently I just have a crap sense of smell.

Or you've just burned all of your smell ability. Maybe.

No, I think that happened for the first week. Month of going into it.

Oh yeah, you're like, what is this?

Somebody will be— somebody new will be walking in like, oh, I don't even smell it.

Yeah, you're like, what? No, like unless it's at a 10, like you're not smelling anything below a 10.

Exactly.

So yeah, so going in and then they put kitty litter under her bed to try and absorb the smell because it's kind of like a fat-based smell. So same with like deep frying stuff, like that kind of gets in hair follicles, clothing. Good lesson, you know. So kitty litter underneath Cheap tricks. Very, very cheap tricks. So we did that. We also used to do shaving cream at the bedside because we didn't have kitty litter. Shaving cream at the bedside was always very good.

What about bugs in the emerge? Talk to me about bed bugs, head lice. How do you deal with that? Because from an operations perspective—

We're just dying over here.

I don't know that you know too much about what I do in the hospital, but clinical operations It's like I'm the one that comes down and is like, you gotta do this. And people are like, our boss is making us do stuff. Believe me, I feel like—

And I get to be the one, and I get to be the one to full-on tell you to your face, yes, hard no, we're not doing that yet.

And I'll be like, okay, well, at least I tried, and I'll document it.

And again, it is what it is. Documentation. Yes, all the time.

My rule is if it's not documented, it didn't happen.

Not done.

So I just document everything.

Nursing rule one.

Yes.

That is nursing rule one.

Absolutely. I teach that to all my students. If my students are listening, you've heard this again. If it's not documented, it didn't happen.

Nobody in court will believe you if you say, oh no, I'm pretty sure, because it's coming usually at you like a year and a half later.

And you're like, ah, well, how do you remember?

Yeah, well, usually you get a little bit of a sixth sense as to like, oh, I'm gonna get nailed to the wall for this one. You're like, the family's writing a lot down. I've already had to tell them that they can't film me. This is this is coming down the pipe. So you go home and you you just in your diary, no patient names. You can date time. This is what's happened. This is you know what I've done and this is my. Yeah. So you can have a personal journal again. No personal health information whatsoever.

No no no.

Um.

No specific details because your notebook could be subpoenaed to the court.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely. So always never never never patient information.

You know what I did? Um. I so I worked as a clinical director patient flow. then I dropped down just clinical operations manager patient flow. But what I was starting to do whenever I was having challenges with bosses or challenges with colleagues or whatever, I would just use my Outlook calendar and put the note in the Outlook calendar so that I could go back and I would have a certain color coding scheme in my Outlook calendar. So then I literally could just open up my year and see all of the dots of when things happened in a certain color code. I had to.

That's freaking genius.

So much stuff was coming up. I just, I didn't know how to keep track of everything. And there's, you know, you know how it is. There's just so much that happens in a day. And who has time at the end of their shift to sit down and— Absolutely no one.

Actually, let's, let's do— let's, let's go there. What happens in a day? What's going on? What's crazy?

Talk about a night shift, because I work a lot of night shifts, so I would love to kind of—

You actually work night shifts?

Yeah, yeah. I love, I love a good night shift.

Kudos to you, babe.

Thanks.

And P.S., I just noticed the hat. I'm like, oh, okay.

I wore this for you. Oh my God. I wore this for you. We love Ativan.

God.

Everyone, I'm wearing an Ativan hat because we love lorazepam and the Emerge.

The Ativan blow dirt.

Yeah, if only we could, right? If only we could.

Ativan diffusers, we've pipped those too.

Could you imagine? They have infusers for cats, you know, if they're stressful, like if a cat is stressed out. You can infuse— why do we not have that? I don't— FDA, get this approved. I would just have it constantly blowing in my face.

Just in the waiting room, just like a little—

Just enough.

Everybody needs to just chill out. Just bring it down, 'cause that's 90% of my job, right, is just to kind of let's bring it down.

Imagine the nurse is just breathing down. That won't be—

Yeah, just be like, what's that? Yeah, the deputy commander of emerg shows up, we're in code blue, black. All of the EMS buses are parked outside. And we're like, it's cool, guys, listen, everything's fine, fine. Just take a deep— just take a deep breath and everything will be fine. Pass out a doobie. Oh my gosh, imagine we just solved all of the problems in the Emerge, literally. From— we need an HVAC specialist, somebody that can help us figure out airflow. They do it in the casino. They must pump something out in the air at the casino.

Well, oxygen.

Okay.

But yes, we're going there.

Bringing this back in.

So, a typical night shift. So, typical night shift, you're going in. So, A, you've hopefully had your pre-shift nap. You have to.

How long do you sleep?

Anywhere from 2 to 4 hours if I can get away with it, depending on what time I go down, or if I'm coming off a night, going into a night. But nap for night shift, breakfast foods, usually for dinner kind of thing, driving in, listening to my ER Pump Up playlist.

Nice.

Love that. All the things like Welcome to the Jungle. Welcome to the Jungle. I'm gonna add Cuts Like a Knife, 'cause freaking love that. Just Baby Did a Bad Thing, and I'm That Bitch. Love that one. Lose Control. All these—

Do you have this song Is this a Spotify list that you can share with me?

I can, I can make it so it's an Apple, but I can absolutely share this list.

Oh my goodness, I need— I gotta have a pump up because I go into the hospital too on 9/12.

Because you're just like, you're just kind of gearing yourself up, right? Because you're like, okay, I gotta go in with a, like, a really half-decent mindset. If I'm kind of like feeling good going in, chances are vibes follow. So yeah, it's just kind of—

Especially if you're just coming off of your 5 off and you're going in for your first of 4, right? You want to like make sure that your start off good.

So yeah, come in, look on the board, where am I? Fine, triage again.

Okay, so she's making a comment, triage again, because there's a specific skill and training that you have to have in order to be a triage nurse. So explain what that is.

Yeah, so usually the— so if you were a new nurse coming into the ER, even if you've got 16 years of med-surg behind you, It's— the ER is its own beast. So it takes like, it's a very graduated system to kind of work through the ER. So when you're first new, you come in, you usually are typically caring for the patients who are admitted, waiting for a bed, but medical or the— so we've got the CTAS guidelines, right? So CTAS is the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, which we're rating everybody on their illness from 1 to 5, 1 being dead or near death. Oh my god. 5 being, why in the world?

Did you come here and not the walk-in clinic?

You should have seen your—

Not for scrapes and ingrown toenails. Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah. So you should have seen your doctor a month ago because it's been 6 weeks kind of thing. Really shouldn't be here. So there's also then timelines associated with the number as to how fast a doctor should theoretically So CTAS 1 is immediate, CTAS 2 is 15 minutes, 3 is 30 minutes, 4 is 120 minutes, so 2 hours, and then 5 is like— or no, 60 minutes for the 4 and up to 2 hours for the 5.

So would you say on average CTAS 1s and 2s are addressed within the time period?

1s for sure.

Yeah.

Sometimes you get kind of a soft one where, you know, a kid is really, really fevered, and with the fever the heart rate comes up, the respiratory rate comes up, everything comes up. So because it knocks so many vital signs into a high range, so now the CTAS program that we, the eCTAS program that we have to work through goes like, oh my God, and it freaks out. Whereas me looking at the kid going like, yeah, the kid looks a little played out, but get some Tylenol and Advil into them, in half an hour, 45 minutes, they're gonna be a completely new kid.

Yeah, it's not gonna be a CTAS, it'll be a 3 or something.

And then I'm gonna slightly drift off and ask.

Yeah.

I know all of these folks Physical.

Wow.

I know we're talking about all of these physical, like, you know, they're sick or they're almost dead. Where do we— and this is only because of personal experience— but how do we rate, like, mental breakdowns?

Mental health triage is very different from physical triage.

It's very different. So if you come in and you say that you're suicidal, Mm-hmm. The main question difference is gonna be, do you have an active plan, or are you just having these feelings? If you have an active plan that, like, you could put into place immediately, theoretically, you're supposed to be a 1.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you're supposed to be seen immediately, because obviously, if you've gotten this far and then have a plan, like, this is Bad News Bears.

Mm-hmm.

Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10, Maybe even 10 times out of 10, we don't. We go, okay, you know, is what it is. You know, unfortunately we actually do have somebody who's bleeding out or imminently about to die. And unfortunately the mental health does get pushed aside.

Do you guys have a mental health ICU like we have the MISU or?

No.

No, not where you are?

No, so where I am it's just a typical ER. We don't even have mental health-specific safe spaces.

Wow. Do you have a social worker on?

We finally do.

Thank goodness.

So I used to work with this gentleman at a previous job, loved him so much. He is just like an absolute angel. And so he's come over to work with us now, and I'm just like, yes, this is so fantastic. Because like the number of times I now refer to him, I'm like, oh my God, I've got access for referrals. I'm so excited.

I would say probably 90% of the time that I spend down in the emerg is in our mental health ICU in the MISU. I don't know if I've talked about this on the pod yet, but a few weeks ago I had a horrific trauma, like, down in the MISU. This guy was 38 years old, big, tall, strong. I don't know what he did. I have no idea what drugs he did.

Mm-hmm.

I have no idea, like, if he had preexisting mental health comorbidities or what, but he was He was so strong. You know, in the mental health units, like, the furniture all weighs like 49 tons?

Oh yeah, it's tough.

He was picking up the 49-ton furniture and chucking it at the supposedly not shatterproof glass, but it was definitely shatterproof. And he grabbed the chunks of glass and was holding it up to his neck. And we had to call in the emergency police brigade or whatever with the shields and the batons and the tasers. And it took 6 guards to apprehend this superhuman Marvel Superman to take him down. Like, insane.

Sounds like meth.

Meth, okay.

Very much so. So we've had similar situations where someone's of just an average size, but all of a sudden it's taking 4 police officers plus 5 of us.

Plus security guards and everything, yeah.

You have multiple? You have multiple guards?

I feel very lucky that we do have a lot of security guards.

Gosh, you're so special. We have, we have one.

What?

Oh yeah, one, one, and it's taken us years to get this one person.

Oh my goodness.

And half the time they're nodding off at the desk and you're like, thanks.

Quick question, is that person like from one of the extended agencies or are they actually—

Yeah, not, not with— not a hospital employee.

Okay, that's very scary because we have Anytime a code white gets called, I would say probably 6 guards show up. Like, one time I had like a 96-pound soaking wet young girl who was in a psychosis, and it took 6 guards to get her pinned down onto the bed so that we could do the IM injection and whatever it was we gave her.

I asked that question because the extent of what they can do is so limited.

Exceedingly limited. They're not even supposed to put hands on her.

I was just gonna say, they can only verbally—

yeah.

Thanks for that.

Yeah, because you can't do that, right? Yeah, listen, exactly.

How many people have I had to restrain over my career? Couldn't even tell you.

Yeah.

Couldn't even tell you.

Yeah, you just make sure that your bag of restraints is well organized, that you've got all 5 or whatever, 6 parts that you need.

Nobody can tie you down faster than an ER nurse.

No, absolutely not.

Absolutely not. Yeah, the major reason I asked about the mental triage was only because I have had people going to with like an absolute breakdown and sit there for 8 hours overnight just to be seen by a nurse who would tell them that—

You're fine.

You're fine. So yeah.

I had a weird situation happen in the spring where I was driving home. I had just been in Toronto, just had a hair appointment, and I was driving home and all of a sudden I had a really sharp pain in my stomach. I didn't know what was going on. And it started getting worse and worse and I was maybe 7 minutes from home. So I call my man and I'm like, something's going on. I'm having a really sharp pain in my stomach. I don't know what's happening. I somehow, by the love of, thank goodness, the universe, guardian angels, whatever, I managed to get my car parked right out front. I jumped out of the car, vomited everywhere, and then I had a panic attack. Like, I didn't know what was happening.

Yep.

Hands were vibrating, feet were vibrating. Ryan's like, get in the car, I'm taking you to the emerg. And on the way, listen to this, on the way I call 911 and I'm like, I'm a healthcare professional. I just don't know if what's happening is an emergency. I don't want to utilize your resources. I just want to make sure that I'm supposed to go to the hospital because I just want to make sure that this is serious enough. And the woman on the line was like, stop the car, pull over, the ambulance will follow you. And I'm like, no, we just live 6 minutes from the hospital. I don't want to use your resources. And the woman was like, thank you for not using the resources, but—

But—

This is ridiculous. Like, use the resources. And so when I finally get to the hospital, and I don't lead by saying, I'm a clinical whatever, blah, blah, blah.

You'd be put to the back of the line so fast.

Exactly. So I don't say shit about it. I said nothing about what my role was or whatever. And would you believe, like, I felt as though my anxiety— they just kept saying, oh, that's anxiety. Oh, the tingling in your fingers and the tingling in your feet. And I'm like, this has never happened to me. Like, this is scary for me. It's never happened to me before. And it's like, in that moment, I was still feeling very vulnerable. I wasn't able to catch my breath. And once I got back, because my heart rate was like 160-whatever, like, it was insane. Once I got back there, the way I just kind of felt like they were like, well, it's just an anxiety attack. It's just an anxiety attack. And I wanted to say, like, don't diminish this because you see this all the time.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? so hard for me in that moment because I know that I diminish it. I know that I diminish it when it's not me who's the vulnerable person. But that was a really eye-opening, like, shit, I need to be more sensitive when somebody is saying that they're having a panic attack or an anxiety attack.

Yeah.

Like, if this is how this feels, like, I don't— I, I just wish that I was able to tap into that exact feeling of how I was feeling when I'm dealing with patients who are feeling with that because the nurses that dealt with me were so dismissive of me. But what they couldn't explain, like why I was vomiting on the side of the road and why I had this horrible pain in my abdomen.

So you should have led with that. If you lead with the physical symptoms, sadly, that's more, not believable, but at least that's tangible for them.

I think it's a pattern that you will notice, like if it's— well, never mind. It's a pattern that I've noticed, like, healthcare workers are so fast to like dismiss their own symptoms when it comes to like, oh yeah, physical ailments. Oh, we're fine, we'll get over it.

Just some Tylenol, Advil, you'll be fine.

Yeah.

And it's so reversed when they're like the one who is taking care of physical ailments. Okay, okay, let's process it. But if it's mental, but like, I don't know, you know, like.

So to be fair, it's taken me a very long time to get comfortable not just with mental health, but the training in mental health was also like nonexistent.

Zilch.

You know, I had one mental health placement in forensic psych in Thunder Bay.

Oh my goodness, wow.

My first 2 IM injections in Thunder Bay.

Okay.

So it's already rough to start. So, you know, here's this guy, he comes up to the— because of course the whole nursing station's glassed in. You have to be like buzzed in to get in. It's like a fishbowl. You have to buzz through like 2 levels of security to get into the department, let alone another buzz-in to then get into the nursing station. And so, you know, we're having our little meeting to start, and I hear this guy like tapping on the glass, and I'm like, he looks like Charles Manson. Like, not even joking, 100%. Very short, but like Charles Manson. And I'm going—

There are some characters.

I'm like, oh my God. And so here my preceptor goes, huh, that's who you're giving your IM injection to? I'm like, pardon me? Like, no. And of course, like, if anybody knows antipsychotics, they are thick. Yes, they are so thick, and you have to have a very large bore, like a big thick needle to get these things in. Things actually go through the needle into the muscle.

And you have to do it in like a—

Oh, glute.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I'm like, okay. So like trying to like, you know, drop the medicine, it's like, it's not coming. And you're just like sitting there trying to pull it down.

This is something you'll remember for the rest of your life.

Yeah. And of course the dose is so big that it's 2 separate injections. I'm like, I don't wanna do this. So then, you know, you get walked out and here's this guy, he just walks ahead of us and he goes into his room. The room's no door, no curtains, no nothing, just mats on the floor. And I'm like, oh my God, like, what is happening? And so then this guy just pulls down his pants and jumps onto the— He's like, I'm ready. Just ass up.

And I'm like, okay, I guess at least for now.

That is not how a usual one of these circumstances occurs.

I'm so thankful that it actually went that way, 'cause it was scary enough just the injection and make sure you're doing it right, and then the scenario, let alone like had his behavior had been anything else other than pristine.

So I didn't know this, but the brigade that came to help us, like the 6 with the shields and everything, they had helmets on, like the full-court press. They also have an EMS person on that team and they do all of the IM injections for us. We didn't have to—

She's living with like all the money.

Gold standards.

But then you're also saying like you're also then like mental— everybody gets sent to you.

Yes.

Whereas we go, oh, you're on—

We get all the prisoners who've swallowed light bulbs and all that stuff.

Listen, I will take a prisoner over the general population 90% of the time.

Because they come with a guard.

No, they are lovely. They are absolutely—

Well, because they're so happy to be out. They are happy to be out.

They're very appreciative. Please and thank you.

The food is better.

The food is much better. Very, very appropriate. Yes, it helps that there's guards there and everything else, but so lovely. And again, I'm not asking anything about you. A, because it's not my business. B, because it's gonna tint my view of you, and it's easier to treat you without knowing. that you've done some things to little people.

Some naughty things, yeah.

That I don't want to know anything. Like, it's easier for me not to know.

Yeah.

Ignorance is bliss at this point.

Absolutely.

Okay, so— Sorry, one second, Sham. Don't redirect us just yet. We have had some prisoners. We have had some prisoners. Sham, I love you. We have had some prisoners who— okay, you know bed crisis is trash.

Yeah, the usual.

So you don't have observers or like one person one guard for whatever, so we'll use our resources to the best of our ability where we'll put 2 prisoners together in the same room. Bad idea. Bad idea. Don't put 2 prisoners in the same room together. They start throwing up gang symbols to each other. Like, when I tell you.

Oh man.

And listen, this is downtown— well, we're not quite downtown, um, we're on the Queensway there. But yeah, really robust mental health program. And in the last few months, I've just Can you tell me if you feel like the mental health patients you're seeing now are worse post-pandemic, or are they kind of the same? Are you seeing the severity shift?

Actually, before, uh, because I wanted to ask about some of the most traumatizing things you guys would have experienced.

Oh, fuck.

Um, obviously you can't say names or anything.

No, never, never, never, never. But okay, so how much trauma do you Something that—

so what my perspective is that affected your career choices or things like that, something that actually affected you as a person, that you have experience working in the ER and you still continue to work there, of course. And that goes for the both of you.

I'll let you go first. The one that, the one that like when you close your eyes and you think about some of the things at night, what's the one that stands out to you the most?

Uh, 2-year-old.

Ugh.

2-year-old code. So, oh, and here we go. Um, so I lived maybe 10 minutes away from the hospital at the time. So great, in and out, whatever. They had called me in, um, they said, hey, can you do a night shift? I said, okay, I can actually only do 8 hours, like I can leave at 3 'cause I've got XYZ to do in the morning, whatever. And they're like, yeah, yeah, whatever, we can take whatever. I'm like, great. So at 2:30 rolls around, I go to my charge, I'm like, hey, like, I'm just gonna go home, like, I've got a half an hour, I haven't had a break, is that cool by you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm literally about to walk out the door, the patch phone goes off. And when the patch phone goes off, usually it's bad news bears. So I, and of course now I'm just interested, I'm just being nosy. So I'm like, okay. And so my charge nurse, you know, you see her writing down, it's like, 2-year-old VSA, which is vital signs absent, which means dead, coming in with EMS. 5 minutes out, and like, that's it, right? So I'm like, oh God, I was gonna go home. So I'm like, okay, technically I've had pediatric experience. I'm looking around, everybody's pretty new because the ER tends to be a younger crowd most times. And I'm looking around, I'm like, oh man. I'm like, uh, so I go to my charge nurse and said, hey, do you want me to stay? And she goes, would you?

Mm-hmm.

I said, yes, it only makes sense that I stay. I am the most qualified nursing-wise to do this. Okay. EMS comes in. It's a beautiful little baby, you know, in just a diaper, covered in puke, pale, and looking at her, you're just like, this is not gonna go. This is not gonna go. So do everything we can. I'm on chest compressions, and, you know, this is different than adults, whereas like 2 minutes, you're tapping out, your abs are done. You're just trying to rotate through.

Rotate through, yeah.

But with a kid, it's just hands, right? So you're just doing this and you're trying to see, and you're just dead focused looking at this kid whose eyes are open.

Hoping to see anything.

A color change, this, that, or the other. Notice this huge contusion on the forehead. I'm like, oh God. And you know, the basic story that we get is Mom's boyfriend found baby in the crib with a blanket around the neck. And I'm like, nope.

No, you did not.

No, you did not. So I'm like, okay, so we're working it, we're working it. 20, 30, 40 minutes goes by, we've done everything. She had an IO, so a needle into the bone, with EMS, that had gone. So we had to do another one just 'cause we couldn't get lines in anywhere. No, I— like, there was— we couldn't put an IV. There's just— she was so shut down. And so we finally get to the point of calling it, and I look at my doc and I said, look, if there's any way that you can call this after I leave, I can't do this. I'm done.

Yeah.

But in the meantime, I had put my phone, 'cause I had PDStat, which is an app that you just throw in the kid's age or weight and it does all the drug calculations for you. It does everything. It's fantastic. So I put it on the podium for whoever was charting just to kind of keep track. So, they're like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna call it in like 5 minutes. I'm like, fuck this, I'm out, I'm gone. So, get all my stuff, run out the door, and I'm like, oh, I forgot my phone on the podium. And I'm like, I live 10 minutes, do I really need it? No, but I'm not coming in for a couple of days, and this is gonna warp me. So, I'm like, I'm not coming in for a couple of days after this. Fine, whatever, run in, grab the phone. As I'm leaving, the mother comes in, and it's just that wail.

The sound.

That wail that you cannot unhear.

It's blood-curdling.

Oh, it's just horrid. And so leave, go home, and sure enough, my daughter is the exact same age. So I go upstairs and, you know, go check on her, throw all the blankets out of the crib. Nope, done. I don't even care if that was what happened or not. I'm done. Go check on my son who He was 4. Go check on him, wake him up, you know, kisses, kisses, kisses.

Yeah, yeah.

All this kind of stuff. Go to bed, wake up the next morning, and there was somehow or another within the next couple of days, the kid's obit somehow ended up on my Facebook feed.

Oh my.

And I don't know, I'm like, I didn't— to see her alive versus dead was completely different. I'm like, I did not Need that image. Like I so did not need that image. And so another day goes by, and then in some Facebook group, you know, people are like complaining, and it's like, oh, somebody just tore a strip off this McDonald's worker, and you know, don't they know that she just lost her baby, and she was only you know two years old? And I'm like, just how is it coming back?

How is it haunting you?

Oh, and you want to talk about haunting. So, you know, dealt with that as best as I could, called EAP, you know, the Employee Assistance Program, got talking with a counselor. To their credit— discredit, they didn't understand what I was trying to get at. I'm like, I'm just looking for what PTSD signs and symptoms I need to be watching out for so that I can kind of get on top of it early, 'cause I can't not get on top of this. Like, I can't. I know that this is it.

Mm-hmm.

to get— I need to deal with it. So thankfully, by the time I talked to the therapist, they kind of had an idea, and they're just like, just watch out for the intrusive thoughts, waking up, all these kind of things. Like, just really be careful, and just if it's— and if you're finding it's like invading and impacting your life on a daily basis, you need to go see somebody. I'm like, okay, fine. Fast forward years later, and got a new therapist, was going for marriage counseling, or going for counseling for like the First time ever, and I pretty much rail on my life thus far, and the daily BS. And after, I think, 3 sessions, she goes, okay, so now that you've kind of vented, she goes, let's do an intake. I'm like, okay. She's like, okay, it's gonna be hard. Do you have any trauma? And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm good.

No, I have no trauma.

She's great.

And she goes—

I'm like, except for that one thing with that kid. And she goes, okay, do you want to talk about it? I said, okay. So we talk about it and I start bawling because I'm like, she's always right here, always right here. And so, you know, the therapist is like, okay, I need you to talk to her and apologize and do whatever you need to do. And I'm like, I'm sorry I couldn't save you. Oh, I'm sorry.

That's so sad.

Sorry I couldn't. But, and then it was like, okay, so can you wrap her up in a blanket? I said, well, We have these Tula blankets at home, and they're like the softest things I think I've ever felt in my life, and it's very much kind of something that I love. And so I'm like, I'm wrapping you up in a Tula blanket, and I'm hugging you, and I'm letting you go. And so she's still there, but she's further back. She's not right here, 'cause I didn't realize that, you know, and we had moved to the city, and I had started working in a pediatric emergency, and it wasn't until— that all started, I'm like, oh, this is affecting me way more than I realized. It wasn't a day-to-day thing, but it was definitely like a lot. So thankfully to that therapist.

Thank you for sharing.

No problem. I tend to cry at the drop of a hat.

So do I. I'm a very emotional person too. I'm sure I'm gonna cry when I share mine. Kids are something that I really struggle with. Oh my gosh. Like, I You'll learn this, and everybody will learn the story of my life, but I had a traumatic childhood. So there's no way that growing up I was ever making decisions to care for children, just because I know what I lived through. I don't think I could ever have to be apprehending children or anything like that.

Yeah.

So kids, I have a really hard time with, but my story is also a child, but a teenager. How long ago was this? June, maybe?

May, June.

May, June. So still kind of fresh. But I got called down to the emerge because whenever the complicated cases come, when detectives have to come on site and whatever, you know how the detectives are. They like circle the nursing station and they're kind of asking for information that, you know, they're not supposed to be asking because HIPAA and they don't have a warrant or a subpoena or anything. So I just, I go down and just make sure that, you know, nothing is, is being done that shouldn't be being done. And so as soon as I get into recess, I see, you know, the whole team and they're, they're resuscitating. I'm like, what's going on? What's the patient? Um, 15.

Wow.

15-year-old. Um, and so I go into her chart. That's another thing that I do is like I go into the chart to see if I can, because they're all doing what they're doing, so I want to see if I can find whatever information that I can that might help out.

Back burner.

So as soon as I open up the chart, I come to discover that she'd been followed by a program at SickKids for sex trafficking. And I also discovered that she was in the hospital not 2 days prior for ETOH withdrawal, and she was found in a bus shelter and had just drank an entire 26er of whiskey or something. And so I'm reading the note, and they were brought her to hospital 2 days prior. She stayed in the department until, I don't know, 8 o'clock in the morning, and when she sobered her up, they discharged her.

Yeah.

When she was discharged, she was run down by her pimp, who ran her over, and she went to her grandfather's house after the rundown. And grandfather said she arrived, she was talking to him, like, they— he put her on the couch to To rest, you know, woke up in the morning. He said goodbye to her. He said that she responded in the morning when he left. And then I guess when he came back from coffee and his appointment or whatever, she was unresponsive on the couch when he returned. So there's suspicious things, all kinds of things kind of happening from information that we're gathering. The brother and the grandfather apparently tried to do chest compressions to revive her, and then EMS arrived and they told EMS that they were doing chest compressions for 45 minutes. So then, you know, we're standing there and the full, you know, code is still happening. And so I enter into the room. Doesn't she have the same color hair as me?

No!

And her eyes are open and they're the most piercing crystal clear color blue. And she has huge black eyes, like head injury, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

The raccoon eyes, the big puffy raccoon eyes. I'm like, this This is a head injury.

Like, what—

this is, you know, what's happening? Anyways, so, you know, they're trying, you know, they're doing everything they can, but she's gone. Like, she's gone gone. And so the blood-curdling scream, but not from a mother, from the grandfather. So the police bring the grandfather in, and I had never heard a man— I had never heard a man scream that way.

Yeah.

And he wanted nothing more than to just be over her body. He just wanted to cradle her body. And the detectives were like, nope, can't touch the body. And I'm like, but he gave CPR to her before she came. His DNA and his fingerprints are all over her. Anyway, why can't he just be over his deceased granddaughter's body? But they wouldn't let him. And we have to wait for the coroner to arrive and we have to do this and that.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh my goodness. And so then of course, I'm in the chart and I'm reading all this thing. Do I not find out, you know, that she's had a horrific past? Her father's incarcerated for murder. Mother hasn't been in the situation for however long. And I just thought to myself, the system has failed this little girl. The system failed this little girl. I almost, you know, even kind of felt like, why did we discharge her after the ETOH incident 2 days ago? Like—

I can tell you why.

We can't keep her. We can't keep her forever. We can't bubble wrap her. What are we gonna do? Yeah, exactly. And she probably was asking to leave.

Yeah.

Anyways, extremely complicated situation. And with the detectives and the coroner and whatnot, finally, once the coroner came and did his sort of initial overview of whatever, he finally allowed for the grandfather to come in. And this raw human experience is just gonna live with me forever. He just prayed over her body. I'm not a big prayer, but I prayed with him. And finally, when everything was said and done, her eyes were still open. And as we were closing up the room and waiting for the coroner to come and pick up the body, I just closed her eyes and very— I'm gonna cry now. Very similar to what you said, I was like, I'm sorry that this happened.

Yeah.

I'm sorry that this happened to you. I'm sorry that you weren't protected. It's so sad.

It's the worst.

Okay, can we talk about your book now?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you guys a second.

And we're back. We just needed to take a quick moment, friends. Trauma can get you in the least expecting moments, but I mean, obviously we wanted to have this conversation. I think it's really important that we have this conversation. I don't think the average Canadian human citizen, unless you work in healthcare, I don't think you can possibly understand what it's like to go through these experiences with the people on your team. So tell me, do you guys debrief after these events? Like, do you feel supported by your leadership team? Like, talk to me about what a debrief looks like after you have one of these really, you know.

Yeah, so the criteria for what constitutes trauma Has really come up, right? Because you're so used to like, that's a code, we worked it, they were, you know, older, they had a good life, you know, they were pretty much gone by the time we got there. Like most, unfortunately, you get to the point where running a code isn't as traumatic anymore.

Yes.

But then you have these ones, or one hits too close to home, like a lot of the suicides, unfortunately.

They—

we debrief after those ones because they're extra rough, right? But it's very hard to then stop in the middle of the day.

Yeah, because you still have patients to take care of.

You still have a whole department full of patients needing things and, and not doing well and orders to receive and like all these other things. Like the world is still—

And ambulances still bringing more people in.

Ambulances still coming in. Or the floor's calling to be like, oh, can you start an IV for us?

Yeah.

Can you do that COVID swab before you send them out?

Oh my God, what does their skin look like?

MRSA as well.

They've got skin.

Yeah, we didn't even talk about bugs. Oh, I wish I mentioned bugs long ago. We don't need to talk about bugs.

Before we even go to bugs though, but I— there was a reason why I asked, because of, um, coming back with all of these traumatic events to your family and the support that you expect or get. Is there something like you wish people would know more about or how to cope with, you know, the things that healthcare workers go through and as a family member, what he'll be able to do for them.

Yeah. Easiest thing for a family member is like, you can obviously tell a change in, in your loved one, right? So if your loved one is normally super chit-chatty, they may be tired, but they're still chit-chatty when they come home. If they come home and they're not talking, you know, they're, they're silently moving around, it's like, I just got to go to bed. I just got to go to bed. I don't care what's going on, I just gotta go to bed. Something's up, right? So the key is, you know, everybody copes differently and everybody— some people wanna talk about it, some people do not wanna talk about it or they're not ready to talk about it. So it's really hard to kinda gauge where that line is. So this is why nurses end up with police, fire, EMS. Yeah.

It's very often— We're nurses too. You do see that. You do see that. Who— what is your husband? What is his background? Is he an accountant? He's an accountant.

So he used to be EMS.

Okay.

He was a paramedic supervisor by the time I met him, and when we moved back down south from up north, there wasn't a lot of openings in EMS, so he ended up getting into infection control.

Oh nice.

Yeah, yeah. So he he swapped over 100% to infection control and nice where we are now.

Pre pandemic?

Pre oh years.

Wow. So the pandemic would have been wild for him. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Because he still had to go in. I'm like, why do you have to go in when you know I have to go in and I'm working straight nights because that you know no daycare and you have we've got two a four and a five year old at the time running around.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're going like, oh my god, like what are we gonna do? Well. I guess it's up to me to work all night, maybe get a nap, stay up all day.

Oh my God.

Maybe get a nap.

Maybe your kid has online school or something that you have to facilitate.

JK. Oh my goodness. And my kids are like, are you kidding me?

Leave them alone. I don't want to educate my kids anymore. Oh my gosh.

Here's the trick to that. You turn on the camera, you, you place them in front of said camera. Yeah. And you turn on the mic, you're And you're like, hi everybody, hi, we're gonna listen to O Canada. Perfect. Camera off, mic off, mic off, camera off.

'Cause if you're yelling at the kids, right? Mic off, always. Get off the table! What are you doing?

Get away from the dog! Leave the dog alone.

IPAC, actually, I'm extremely interested in IPAC because with patient flow and operations, like—

Yeah, it's a huge deal.

You have to know who can cohort with who, right? So in case you didn't know, now you know, we don't have enough hospital beds. in any hospital anywhere.

No shit.

Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert if you didn't know. So what we have to do is actually identify people with the same infectious disease. If you can, potentially put them in the same room together so that we can save as many of the private rooms as possible. So I— ESBL, VRE, CPE, MRSA, all of the mad cow disease, necrotizing Fasciitis and bugs, bugs and bugs.

Bugs don't need to be isolated.

The way you guys ladies are getting turned on by all of these names, it's, it's so—

wow, it's sick, right? It's a sick affinity. But I don't know how else to explain it. Like, when you are a healthcare junkie, it's like these are the things that you're constantly thinking about.

Yeah, I am fascinated every time I talk to somebody who doesn't work in healthcare Okay, and the way my mind is working, oh my God, there were like maggots falling off of his—

they're like, what?

Yeah, or, or like, this is to come, but I'm hoping to, uh, just start some kind of sarcastic swag sort of things. And like, I want to have a t-shirt that says like, there's C. diff on my shoes.

Like, the H doesn't stand for Hilton. Listen, I'm already using that hashtag. I'm gonna get in so much trouble with Hilton, but it's like the H doesn't stand for Hilton. Hashtag acopia.

Yes.

All the things, right? Like it's all these little weird intricacies. But I mean, the bugs don't need to be isolated.

The bugs don't, but the inpatient units think that they do. So in a merge, because you deal with it so much, it's like strip them down, put all of their stuff in bags, Take the sample of the bug, put it in a pill jar so that when environmental control or whatever—

What are you guys doing over there?

Well, I don't know. In Toronto, the bugs are just everywhere, and it's, you know, you can't escape it. So we've just gotten so used to the bugs and the maggots and whatever. So the protocol is very easy.

Whatever.

Yeah, the ER— like, a lot of the bugs scare a lot of ER nurses. Like, there's not a lot of ways to scare an ER nurse, but like bugs are one of them. So usually you go up to your buddy, you're like, hey, I can't deal with bone out of skin, but I know you got maggots. Yeah, I know you can't do maggots. Yeah, you want to swap?

I'll swap your maggots for your exposed bone any day. Any day.

Or your dental things. I'm not great with dental. Or like your cyclical vomiters who are just like continuing to retch, and I'm just like, I can't.

Having a hard time not retching yourself. Yeah, yeah.

The empathetic vomiter in me is like, Yeah, okay, let's, let's get down more to like mentorship. I know you guys have been in your fields for like a very long time.

Don't make us seem old. It's only— we've only been doing it for 5 minutes.

It's half a second.

Half a second.

Yeah, not even born yet.

Well, I know probably when I first started in long-term care, I don't I don't think you were born yet.

No.

No.

Yes. Well, now we have to put an age.

Hold on, I get people to guess.

Oh God.

How do you— how old?

I'm gonna say 23, but that's—

Good for you!

That's so accurate.

Wow, usually people guess a little bit older, but that, that was spot on. Well done.

Are you actually 23?

Yeah.

Stop! Yeah, you should go to the carnival and be a carny and do that, uh, carny game where you can guess people's No, listen, the joke is everyone's like, how much does the patient weigh? I'm like, I don't work at the carnival.

I'm not a carny.

I'm not a carny. There are scales on the beds for very good reasons. I don't like— because you can't guess. Because like, if somebody's got a blanket up to their waist, you're like, oh, they're 130, 140 pounds. You take off the blanket and they've got, unfortunately, very large swollen legs. You're like, uh, I was way off.

Exactly.

No, but oh, we want to get on to like The mentorship, like especially nursing, because I swear to God, the number of times we've spoken about, um, um, the work culture and how, how senior nurses train or are able to guide or not guide their younger ones, like, you know, with the eat your young mentality.

Oh yeah, I can't even with that. It's such bullshit, and I just hate it to its core because again, in nursing school they mentioned it.

Yeah. Oh, it's in textbooks.

It's in textbooks. And they're like, oh hey, you know, just as an aside, nurses eat their young. And I'm like, what does that even mean? Pardon?

Tell me a lot more about it.

Oh my God. So it's like, so am I expecting it? Am I accepting it? Like, what is the point of you telling me this? Like, I don't understand. And so again, you go into clinicals as a student and you can kind of very quickly feel out that, you know, this nurse is not great. She's very, you know, and they make you do all these little debriefs after your clinical, and all the nurses go like— or all the students go like, oh my god, that one nurse is just so awful. How is she a nurse? And I've done it. So you're like, I don't understand. And then you get working, and then you're like, oh, this, this is how people get like this.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's hardened. You become— not every nurse, but I think there are some nurses who become hardened.

You can't not.

Yeah. And there's like an Like you're impatient because you're just trying to get your job done. You're just trying to take care of the patient, and if the person beside you is fumbling or struggling, then it can come off as like biting their head off, right?

So it's like you have to be very careful about how you approach not necessarily criticisms, but just like hey, just maybe for next time kind of thing. Like you have to be very gentle, and like again depends on the generation. Depends on the person, depends on the background.

If they had a mother that was a nurse, or yeah, like if they have seen it in action and they know somebody who's been a nurse. But if they've never been exposed to anything and they did all their education online?

Yeah. Oh, it's not even the 18— the gigantic IV going like this way through the hand. It's like, I got my degree online. And so it's hard, right? So coming out of school, like my first 5 years, like I was horrifically bullied.

Wow.

And it was just a supervisor who, you know, she was there Monday to Friday, 7 to 3. Nobody could quite figure out what she did. She had her own office, so she'd just kind of disappear for a lot of the day. She was 60 if she was a day at that time. And like, all of the nurses were petrified of her. Even the ones that had been there 20, 30 years were also still petrified of her. And you're like, well, why is this? This makes no sense. And so the one thing that she did do is she made the schedule.

Oh.

And so as a part-time, again, you get thrown here, there, and everywhere. And we actually were always staffed, so like, you know, part-time, it was kind of hit or miss. And so she would schedule you a night shift and then doubling back to a day shift. So what that means is you get off at 7 AM on like the Monday, you're expected to come in for 7 AM for a day shift on Tuesday.

Oh.

So it is completely against ONA contract.

Yes.

Absolutely completely against it, but she would do this routinely. And so you go and you're new and you're not quite sure what you're doing and you're just wanting to like kind of fly under the radar for a little bit, but with only one emerg nurse and one RN for the floor with 2 RPNs, there's no flying under the radar. Like everything is wide out in the open. And so it's like, okay, well, maybe I just— this is just me putting in my time. I'm just kind of, you know, gaining my seniority. I'm just trying to, like, put in my time and, like, gain— get my foot in the door kind of thing.

Mm-hmm.

But man, she hated me from the get-go. And I have no idea whether it was because I was Southern, you know, and they had a hard-on for hating on the Southern folk. And I'm just like, okay. I ask my husband sometimes, like, was I really like bad? He's like, well, you were green, right? Like you were excited and you wanted to do things and you were, you know, want to get things moving. And like, yeah, you were overenthusiastic maybe, and maybe that just rubbed her the wrong way. But he goes like, you weren't awful. And I'm like— and he's the EMS supervisor, so he can like pop in and out of the hospital at any point in time. And he goes like, it just, you know, we all know this person. This person's been around the town, and a very small town, like less than 5,000 people. This person's been around the town for 40-plus years. You know...

She's a part of the paint on the wall of the department.

She's such— yeah, like, she's got this legacy, and like, not a great one. So he's like, oh yeah, I know her, and you know, she's mean, and this, that, and the other, and just watch your back, and it's not you, it's her, and all this stuff. Well, that's great, you can say that all you want, that it's not you, it's her, but when you're like having palpitations, you know, pulling into the parking lot and Seeing her vehicle, you better believe I'm never going to buy a freaking Envoy ever.

Sorry, GM tainted.

Sorry, GMC. But like, never, ever, ever will I buy an Envoy. Like, it's just— that was just a representation of her, right? So if you saw that, you're like, oh, she's on today. Not, you know, obviously if it's Monday to Friday, you kind of knew that that's what you're walking into. But, you know, there's that sliver of hope that maybe she's off on the holidays or something.

Yeah.

And it just was like constant, you know. She'd come into the room, I'm trying to do something, she'd belittle me in front of the patient, she'd belittle me in front of other coworkers. Just was horrific.

I can't imagine having a traumatic event at work and then that being the person that you have to go to for like emotional mental health support.

Forget about it.

Not happening. Especially being brand new to nursing too, right? You haven't seen all the weird things. You haven't been there and done that and bought the t-shirt and the bumper sticker and The COVID's not on your shoes yet. So when you're still so new, you're trying to navigate who your support is and who your allies are and who you can go to to say, I'm having a really hard time with this IV. Can you help me? And it not be a diminishment of your skill level or whatever.

Actually, in that situation, who was your go-to person professionally? Who were you relying on? Nobody.

Not one soul.

Wow.

There was nobody that you could count on. There was nobody that you could bounce an idea off of, because if there was any sort of ounce of gossip to it, it was gone. It was through the town. You know, I— if I don't ever have to go back up there, short of her funeral, just to make sure she's in there.

Celebration of life.

Just to make sure she's alive.

Just make sure she's alive.

I need to make sure that she's in the box, 'cause that will be the end of the reign of terror. 'Cause we had sat down one time, because I'd been there a couple years, and we got talking, and you kind of finally found the people that you knew that you could be semi-open with without it going straight back to her, but you knew that there was always that risk. And so talking to them and being like, how many people has she scared off? They sat down, they figured out, in the roughly 20 to 25 years, she had scared off at least 12 to 15 RNs, registered nurses, in a town of less than 5,000.

That's not right.

That's insane.

That's not right.

It's not. And so when I went up there, like, yes, my husband was already living and working there, um, but the government deemed it an underserviced area at the time for nursing. So for every year I worked full-time hours, I got one year's tuition back. Nice. So I'm like, oh, this is such a win-win, at the time before I started going like—

And then you're like, is this worth it?

Oh, that's why it's underserviced.

Oh my little God.

Imagine a whole town not getting proper healthcare because she's just doing that.

One person.

Oh my gosh.

And you know, you bring it up to your then, uh, I think it was like the nursing, you know, administrator or whatever, or whatever, and you're like, hey, like, this is happening, like, I'm not comfortable, I, I really feel uncomfortable with things. Well, that's just her. Pardon me? And then you're like, okay, yeah.

Validating her behavior— or not validating, but justifying her behavior.

100% supporting her behavior. So by the time I got to quit, best— one of the best days of my fucking life.

Did you tell her where to go?

I was so tempted. So, you know, my husband— we had— I'd already gotten a job where we were moving to. It had taken 4 months for for that health system to find my husband a job because there wasn't enough jobs in EMS. So that's how he kind of got into infection control. And so when he called me to say that yes, he's signing— he signed the papers, we're okay to move down, I crumpled on the floor and bawled my face off.

Yeah, happy tears, of course.

Yeah.

And then I'm like, I get to quit.

Yes!

How do I go out in a blaze of glory?

So I, I put on the exact same outfit that I interviewed in. I marched my smart ass into the office. Yeah, you did. And so I met with the chief nursing officer, and as much as I wanted to just go off, I'm like, look, this is a very professional field, whatever. So I'm like, you know what, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been a very interesting learning opportunity. No matter what, this is my— this was my start in emergency medicine, and I'm continuing in emergency medicine. So thank for this opportunity to have this opportunity to learn and to have some very interesting experiences.

Good for you.

And I said, you know, here's my, here's my 2 weeks. See ya!

See ya! Can I take my vacation before I go?

So I marched my little behind all the way up to the floor.

Scheduling.

Yeah, well, because she's like the— it's all on the same floor because it's so small. And so I go up there and everyone's like, why are you all dressed up? Because no one really I look like a hobo, and they're like, why?

So do I when I go in.

Hundred percent. And they're like, why are you all dressed up? Like, I just have to talk to you know who. And so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go do it. Does anybody know where where she is? Where where's she at? Where's she at? And so I'm like, this is my moment. We're just like waiting, and she comes out of she comes barreling out of her office. I'm like, oh hey, can I just talk to you for a second? She's like. Oh, you're quitting? Okay, fine, I know. And she's gone. And I'm like—

She didn't even let you have your moment.

And I knew that she wouldn't.

That's pathetic.

That's so—

Still gets better. So, you know, I'm like, okay, there's my 2 weeks. I've got 3, 4 shifts before my 2 weeks' notice. She can't— I come on for my first of the 4, I think, like, over the 2 weeks it's 4 shifts. I come on for the first one, she's cancelled the rest of Can she do that? I didn't care.

I'm like, I'm out. See you later.

If that's your last grasp at straws, fine, whatever. So again, writing the book and like putting all my bullying experiences in there and her being the number one, I'm like, man, I am so tempted to send a signed copy.

Oh, you should throw it in there.

Before we even get to discussing your book, because I have been— I mean, you've already mentioned it, but just fast forward to like now.

Yeah.

And as somebody who is in a position of being the mentor, yeah, what are some of the things that you are doing or you want your peers or, you know, senior nurses right now to approach things differently, just to like train staff or how we support them?

Yeah, like if we've got some senior nurses listening to the pod, I'm sure there are a lot of them actually. What would be your recommendation for how to support integrating new grads as well as internationally trained nurses? How would— what kind of suggestions do you have to support them?

Try and remember the fear.

Oh yeah.

Try and remember walking onto the floor for the first time. Try to remember how much, you know, how much effort it took to then come to somebody to ask for help. Try and remember being belittled by somebody else and like how that made you feel. So why are we continuing on? Like, we need to just— it needs to not happen anymore. It's completely crazy. We're adult men and women making adult other women, men and women cry. For what purpose? I don't understand. So just—

We're in the business of caring for people. We should care for each other with just the much veracity We care for people. Let's care for each other with just as much veracity and passion as we would our, you know, open bone breaks and our VSAs. And, you know, we don't care for each other enough.

What are some of the habits you're seeing in young nurses that, that's just ticking it off or something that they should be working on?

Yeah.

What about that?

Yeah, any advice for them?

Yeah, so I actually, uh, ended up teaching a little bit at Brock University. to the first years. And so, you know, here's the professor, Dr. Catherine Halvorsen, and she's like, oh, come and talk to the new students. I'm like, about what? She's like, you've got 3 hours. I'm like, 3 hours? What am I going to talk about? She's like, oh, whatever you want. I'm like— she's like, oh, your stories. I'm like, do you want them to stay in nursing or do you not want them to stay in nursing? She's like, no, no, no, we want them to stay. I'm like, okay, just making sure.

Yeah, exactly.

And so ended up talking to them. about just like randomness of everything, right? So, you know, getting into it, it's very, very hard. You know, you have to take care of yourself. And to their credit, these— I'm gonna say kids, but like they were of all ages— these men and women were so freaking in tune. Their questions were all about, what's your self-care? How do you manage boundaries? How do you manage a work-life balance? How do you take care of yourself? How do you know when to walk away? How do you deal with bullies? I'm like, Wow. And I'm like, you guys are like not even a month into the first year. I'm like, I am so impressed.

I have goosebumps. I just think that this is indicative of the younger generation. I just think that they are so much more self-aware and aware of society and aware of the human experience. I just think that young people are more prepared in a sense to protect themselves.

Absolutely. And it's kind of funny because Because like a lot of those who are older, you know, we've gone through the mentality of like, oh, you have to like slave away. And you know, yeah, you're not a good nurse unless you give all of yourself, leaving nothing for, you know—

Your family or your life.

Your family or yourself, you know, mentally. And so when these new hires are coming in and they're saying, no, I just want to work part-time. No, I just want to work, you know, I'm just gonna do this or I'm just gonna do that. And setting very clear boundaries. And people getting pissed being like, oh, I can't believe They're not gonna— they're not picking up every week.

They're not gonna sell their soul.

They're not selling their soul to this place that ruins their mental health and well-being. Like, what do you mean?

They're just treating it like a job, not their entire identity.

Yeah, I think this, this was a concept that was pushed a lot about, um, treating a job as a job. Yeah, the moment I entered high school, like, that's all I've ever heard.

Really?

Yeah, I think it was coming from like your generation, as like, because you guys were in the workforce and we were constantly hearing this, treat the job as a job and nothing more than that.

That's it.

Always listen, always, always see what the organization's prioritizing for you. And it's like, how much— how fast is your, uh, job posting going to go up the moment you decide to quit?

Like, oh, or die.

Yeah, or die.

You— they would put up the job posting before they'd put up your obit.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, it's, uh, definitely—

I think, I think that's like everywhere now. Like, even my peers, like, going forward, maybe the first year you work your butt off and then you're like, nope, this isn't worth it. This isn't it.

No.

Yeah, and that's fine, right? So again, everybody's complaining about like, oh, these nurses are leaving the profession, and it's not just they're leaving that job, they're leaving nursing, period. And I'm like, okay, because what did you do to help support them while they were coming in? Because really the learning curve is straight up coming out of nursing school. Like IVs. Putting in an IV? Oh, that's something you'll learn on the job.

What?

Oh yeah.

Practice on a banana.

Not even. Not even. Oh, we'll teach you how to take them out. Big deal. It's a Band-Aid that you just take off. Like, no skill involved in taking out an IV. IV. It's putting in the IV. That's completely 100% science.

And I mean, it's terrifying to think because in what, by 2030, over 20% of the population will be over the age of 65. We already don't have enough support infrastructure, staffing, whatever, for the elderly people to be taken care of. And we have so few young professionals choosing to go the route of nursing and even education and, you know, public and social services It's like, what is our society going to look like? What are hospitals— how are hospitals going to be staffed? Like, will they be staffed by AI robots? Like, how— what is healthcare going to look like in 10 or 15 years when all of the boomers have now grad— are graduated? All of the boomers have retired.

Graduated.

All of the Gen Xs and millennials are now coming up to starting to be thinking about retiring, wanting to drop down to part-time. And then we don't have this now flood of young nursing professionals because it's not a glamorous job. Like, healthcare is not a glamorous job. And you're also not getting paid like a TikToker gets paid. You're not getting paid like Kim Kardashian's getting paid, you know? Like—

Because at this point, looking at the new, like, generation, either people are coming into the nursing profession, even healthcare as a matter of fact, assessing the field and be like, you know, This is not for me. Yeah, like, and I love that because I wouldn't want somebody miserable as hell in their job, don't like it, don't want to do it, and still there for the paycheck. And I would rather have somebody who's actually, you know, really good at it and is passionate about it. But at the same time, everybody is running away from healthcare. Yeah, this is for great reasons.

Yeah, and all good reasons.

Or even if you want to sustain, like for example, um, Um, as a nurse, if you want to sustain, you have to have like multiple different sources of income. You're, you're starting your business, you're being an influencer.

Everybody's got double jobs. Everybody I know in healthcare has a side hustle, a main hustle, a side hustle, a casual hustle. They start writing books, they're doing research, they're teaching, they do consulting on the side. Like every single person I know in healthcare is—

And I think that's great. I think that's great because you have a way to escape that, you know, crazy, uh, what do we say? I don't know.

Yeah, day in, day out.

And yeah, it's amazing that people have like an escape route for that. Like, I'm gonna work 3 days and then I'm out.

Yeah.

Uh, but at the same time, again, not enough people. Yeah.

I say this all the time, it's one of my favorite quotes. Albert Einstein says the definition of insanity is doing same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Yeah.

We're doing the same thing over and over again for 55 decades, 50 years. Nothing's changed. The entire population of Earth and who we are as humans has changed post-pandemic. The workforce has changed. Technology has changed. Yet we're still sticking to the systems that were established by boomers in 1949.

Yep.

And expecting the younger generation to fit into the boxes that were created at a time when the way the system is didn't— they didn't even have a glimmer in the eye of what AI was going to do to the workforce. And it's just—

And it's also a fact that every, every nurse that I personally know, like a friend or a colleague, or— they're better at their job if they're also doing like multiple things.

Yeah.

Because when they have a break, they're so much better at their job.

Yeah.

They prioritize The moment they walk in on the floor, they're like, I know exactly what I need to do. I need to prioritize this patient. I care for this patient. And then you would have this miserable, miserable healthcare worker whose entire personality is them being in healthcare.

Healthcare, yeah.

And they're just so bad. And being miserable.

And being miserable.

And being that person.

And they're so bad.

I'm a really annoying leader because when I come onto the floor, I'll be like, oh, uh, what room is Mr. Smith in? And they'd be like, is that the diverting tube? Is that the diverticulitis in 82B? I'm like, no, it's not the diverticulitis in 82B. It's Mr. Smith. Oh, I don't know who Mr. Smith is.

Like, to the other side of that, it's also a way to protect patient privacy.

Oh, of course.

So that's, of course, so that's again our just way of like talking. It's not that we're making the person into the disease. It's just a way of like This way I don't slip up and accidentally say their name when I'm not supposed to. Because again, we've obviously been beaten into us that patient privacy, privacy, privacy, and as it should be. And this is why this is how these stories come about, right?

Yeah.

Oh, this guy, that guy. Yeah, like that's just how— it's not that we're, I had this GSW, I had this small bowel obstruction.

Like you don't.

And then, but then it turns into the stories, right?

Exactly.

So then it's the stories of I had that Let's finally talk about your book and the story.

Oh my God.

Listen, you've probably heard, well, at least 2.

Oh, good.

Okay. Yeah, you've already heard 2.

Naturally, organically. Look, we're good at this, Shannon. We're good at this.

Let's do your book, and then we'll do a little bit of segments.

Yeah, we have a couple of segments that we do every episode. So if we can talk about the book—

We'll get to it, but let's talk about your book first.

Yeah.

So book started out as a trauma journal. Okay, so with COVID with completely hitting rock bottom, with having attorneys offer to do our wills for free.

Stop it.

Not even joking.

Wow, that's a new one for me. I haven't heard that one.

I want to know more about that.

Oh, because they— so when everything first shut down, yeah, and everybody's like, oh my God, healthcare, our healthcare heroes, hero, let's bang pots. Oh my God, I'm like, this is really—

we did do that in India.

We did it here. I used We did it here. People stood outside.

Yep. Oh my God.

This is how we were celebrated.

This is how we were celebrated. So, I'm like, this is so weird because like I refer to working as the public as being an abusive relationship.

Kind of.

Where I'm the victim. For the abuser to finally go, oh my God, thank you.

The abuser is just literally standing on their balcony and going—

100%. And then you see these people coming in or, oh, we brought Oh, we brought you all this food, or, oh, we brought you all these gifts, or, oh, we brought, you know, gift certificates, or whatever. And you're like, the hell is happening?

Stockholm syndrome. I, I know this is, is an unpopular opinion, hot take, whatever, but I hated being called a hero. Like, it just, it was, it was so— it just kind of felt like it was diminishing. Like, I'm doing my job. Yeah, I have to do this. I don't have a choice.

I've been doing this for 20 years.

Yeah, I'm not—

what am I gonna do?

Yeah, I can't I can't go and work anywhere else now because the entire world is shut down. So I have to go to my job to be able to continue to pay my bills. I'm not a hero. I'm doing what I've been doing for my entire career, but now all of a sudden you're celebrating me?

Yes, 100%. I hated it. It made me so cringe and so uncomfortable. I was like, I can't handle this. But with that, and then the attorneys came forward and the psychotherapists and the psychiatrists came forward to offer Um, free therapy. God bless them. That's how I felt.

Didn't they push for your therapy to be covered now?

I don't know. They're gonna try. They're gonna try.

Oh, I hope that happens.

I hope so too. But who gets to pick who's the therapist?

Exactly. And that's the main thing. Yeah, who gets to pick who's the therapist? And do I get 3 sessions or do I get 30 sessions? Because 3 is not going to be enough.

I'm pretty sure right now with, uh, EAP where I'm working, you get— you can have One session a week covered.

Okay.

Yes. Whether or not, again, you get to just pick your, your person or you're just kind of randomly assigned, whomever is what it is. But, you know, going through and, you know, having that fear and, okay, am I gonna die? Am I gonna make my kids sick? Am I gonna make my family sick?

Did you go home or did you go to hotels or did you—

I went home.

Good for you.

I—

we were just kind of looking at each other going like, we've financially don't really have another option. We're both frontline. He's going to work, I'm going to work. So like, really, there's no preventing it. Like, there wasn't like one safe parent and one dirty parent. Like, there wasn't any of that. So it's like, okay, it is what it is at this point. And making the very conscious decision to still love on my kids.

Yes.

Because my kids are very physical.

Yeah.

They're insane, and they're monkeys, and they're stage 5 clingers, and And they're all over you. So there was no stopping them. No. The only hope was like stripping in the garage and trying to like be like, Mommy's just gotta run up for shower and like running up to try and get the shower. And then they jump in the shower with you and you're like, guys, you know, they're 4 and 5, so they're just like, I missed you. And you're like, thanks, but like, can I have like a minute? Let's decontaminate a little bit.

Daddy's infection control rules say I have to shower before I can touch you.

Daddy says. It's like, you know, then, you know, sitting and, you know, oh, it's going to be a week. Oh, it's going to be 2 weeks. Oh, it's going to be a month. Oh, it's going to be 2 months. And it's like, this is not—

no, this is not going to stop. No, this is not going to stop. And then even once we hit like whatever wave 12, God only knows, and it was like, COVID's not going anywhere. No. And then I don't even know exactly when the conversation was like, okay, how are we going to just integrate this into our practice now forever and ever? Because Because it's not gonna go anywhere. Like, exactly. Yeah, definitely not.

Going through that and kind of coming to terms with it, and then it's like, okay, you know, what happens if I die?

Yeah.

How, how in the world do you explain to a 4 and 5-year-old that Mommy chose to continue to go to work and that killed her? Like, how do you explain that? And so I'm like, okay, how do I— something, something, something, something. So ended up, you know, let me write all my good stuff And you've got a couple good stories, but like, they're really— it's the bad ones that stick. So then all of a sudden all the bad ones come out.

You have to document the therapeutic nature of journaling is not just everything is sunshine and rainbows. I want to have this documented for my kids in case I die, but guess what? Everything fucking sucks.

Everything sucks.

And it's a flaming dumpster fire. Yeah, exactly.

going through the stories and, and, you know, going through them, not realizing that the bullying— I was flight or fight, and I was flight.

Yeah.

So I wondered why all of a sudden, you know, I had, um, one job where I stayed there 5, 6 years and then went to another emergency room and stayed there a year, went to another emergency room, stayed there for a year, came to my emergency room now and stayed there for 2 years. COVID hit, I burnt right out. My coworker was a horrendous bitch, so I went to—

Shout out to her. We don't like you.

Can't even. Again, like, I don't even know if she's like paid enough attention to know that she's in this book.

Whatever, who cares? Hopefully she does. It's another one you should send in the mail.

I could take that one to work, 'cause guess who I still work with?

Oh dear.

Yes. know, doing all these things, that's like, oh, here's this like thread of like, oh, I just— once I hit a wall and I got no support, I left. And so it's like, oh, there— oh, it's like, oh, you're ready.

I feel like we're kindred spirits. There's so many— there's so many overlaps in our story.

Just a basic white girl. I know.

I think, um, yeah, never mind.

You can think You can think, you can think out loud.

I was actually, I was actually just, um, talking about— we already discussed it though, like coworkers and how that affect as, as just being your support system. So like the story you mentioned, I was just going to go back to it, but I think we've covered it.

So the book, how did the book evolve from a trauma journal to writing down the flaming dumpster fire tales? That's what it should have been called, Flaming Dumpster Tales from the ER.

What's your book called?

What's the title of the book?

So, Nursing Intuition: How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity, and Survive Your Career.

Wow.

Bless!

When is it coming out? Is it done done?

It's done done, coming out October 29th. It's up for pre-order on Amazon right now.

Nice.

For the ebook.

And so, um, it just— it was this, you know, you found the thread of like the bullying and what I did with the bullying. So I'm like, okay, I've I flat out left. And then you go back into all the other stories and you kind of like tease them out for full-on chapters versus just like the 2-minute like, hey, this is what I had, this is why I'm completely crazy about pancreatitis, and tease it out into a full-on story for a chapter. And it's like, oh, like I trusted my gut like this whole time, like that played a role this whole time. And so I'm like, okay, interesting take. Was listening to Llewellyn, which is a book publisher out in in the southern US somewhere, and they were having online book fairs. So got listening to them, and it was like, oh, um, you know, Intuition at Work was one of the books that the author was talking about. I'm like, Intuition at Work? I'm like, I use my intuition all the freaking time.

Yeah.

I'm like, ding. I'm like, okay. So I'm like, well, obviously I can't really do anything with this without scholarly support. Get on the internet. There is so many journals and scholarly articles, not just about intuition, but intuition and nursing, and intuition versus insight.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh my God, there's evidence!

Yeah.

I'm like, okay, so now I can full-on put it out there. I can— I still may have my ass handed to me, sure, science, whatever, there for it. But like, here you go. Because like, how many times have You gone like, oh, I trusted my gut.

Yeah.

And not just nursing, not just women, right? You walk into a bar, like a creep factor.

Yeah. Or even you just walk by somebody on the street.

Yeah.

And you just feel that there's an energy. I'm, I'm gonna tell a story for one of our board of directors. He just actually started at St. Mike's, and he's a doctor from India, and he was working in the emerge as a registration clerk, just started, finally getting his foot in the door where he needs to be. And patient was triaged, patient was sent over to him. He was asking the patient questions and like objective, subjective, whatever. He was looking at the patient and he was like, I think this guy's having a stroke. And so as soon as he finished his documentation, put the wristband on, he went over to the triage nurse and he said, I think you need to check him.

Yeah.

You need to check him. I think he's had a stroke. Sure enough, full-blown stroke. And the nurse came over to him like an hour later and was like, how did you know that? Like, how did you catch that? I triaged the patient. Like, how did you catch that? He's like, I don't know, just gut instinct. Intuition.

So many instances, right? Where it's just like, it's just that thing, it pops into your— an idea pops into your head out of nowhere. Supported, unsupported, nobody knows. But if you choose to go with it, let's see if it's right, right? So the science is there. is there for it, which, you know, so let's start teaching. And the key is just to like just listen to it. Like, if you do nothing more than just listen to it, that would make me so happy. Um, if you follow through with it, if you go to talk to your doc to see like, hey, like, I don't know about this person. Like, here are their vitals and their story's not super suspicious, but like, I just don't have a good feeling about this.

Yeah.

If you can put it into those terms, 9 times out of 10, if your doc's got more than 7, 8 years experience in, they're gonna stop and they're gonna come and see your patient. And so take that into account. And then if you're kind of hesitant about it, even just having your doc come and see your patient, even if nothing's really wrong, just them coming to see your patient still improves patient outcomes.

Yeah.

So it's a win-win regardless. You're learning how to trust your gut, you're going with it, you're putting yourself out there by advocating But you're starting to build your voice. You're starting to, to really move into it.

And once I feel like those instances of your intuition kicking and you follow it and your intuition was right, I think the more time you're right, then you begin to start trusting yourself a lot more. And, you know, it's, it's nuts how it's like your Spidey senses, you know? Yeah.

I'm so sorry, I'm always so good at remembering like the sequence, but I completely forgot to ask about Oh, well, this is a good thing.

Oh, cool. It's a collaborative thing. It's no longer, you know, when the doctor comes in, you get up and give them their seat, which predates me and my practice, but did I see it? Yes.

Yeah, you will sometimes get patients who are very dismissive of the nurse. I just want to talk to the doctor. I just want to talk to the doctor. And when I— then the nurse calls me, Because the patients now become irate and upset, and then I have to come down and educate them to say, actually, you know, your nurse probably knows you a little bit better than the doctor. Because when the doctor shows up for rounds, the doctor gets report from the nurse and then reads what they read in the chart.

And then comes to see you.

And then comes to see you. So if you're having issues with dealing with your nurse, you are probably not going to have the best care experience here because The nurse knows you way better than the doctor is going to know you. The doctor is just going to give the stamp of approval to what the nurse is observing throughout the course of your care and is reviewing from your lab values and all of the other things that are happening with you while you're here.

Yeah.

And it's those education moments, I think, with patients where the average person in society, and especially the elderly, they just don't understand how The dynamics work. They just, they don't understand. And nurses are not celebrated.

So right now, like, now, yep, there's no like the toxic nurse to physician dynamic?

I think that most physicians know that their nurse is the glue that holds the shit together, and if they treat their nurses poorly, then their experience is going to be—

Do you see any generational difference between how like younger physicians approach the nursing staff?

So usually younger physicians are a little bit quicker to give you their first name and just be like, hey, I'm Mike, I'm so-and-so, I'm whatever.

What about in terms of conservative when it comes to discharging practices or thoroughness in testing? Are you seeing anything different with the younger docs coming in?

No, because like really in the ER, if we know that it's going to be several hours, we're going to just do everything anyways, right? So we've got our medical directive that we can work. We can start blood work, we can start specific x-rays, we can potentially do a couple of medications, we can do all the things. Chances are if I've triaged you, I kind of already have a plan for your plan of care. If I'm seeing you and I'm like, you're admitted, you're just admitted, yeah, you're not going anywhere.

All this, there's no point in even— No, yeah, no, no.

And so it's just, you know, let's just control your pain, let's get you organized, let's get everything rolling in the right direction, but 100%, like, I know you're They're not gonna go anywhere. Discharges, that kind of—

That happens more so up on the floor, I guess, like once they get in. Well, you are discharging a lot of people. We are discharging a lot of people.

But again, like, people are staying up to 100 hours.

Yeah, that's right. Like, like, so their entire admission is in the emerg.

Yeah, which is horrendous.

Very horrendous.

One of my residents went in for like a little bit of complication, um, stayed 5 days.

On a stretcher.

On a stretcher.

Did they have any pressure sores, bedsores, all of that when they sent them back to you? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

They stayed and they stayed on the stretcher for five days. They had a surgery scheduled otherwise, and they were like, "You know what? We're just gonna keep you at the hospital." Never got a bed. Stayed in the emerge like the whole time.

That's horrible.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

It's not like. We understand.

It's not the ideal.

Yeah, it's not ideal. We, we get it, you know.

How old was the patient? Because they say that there's a greater increase of delirium setting in if they already have a pre-existing cognitive impairment or something.

So the reason why we had to send them was because even though there was nothing physically wrong with them, because their medical condition was so complicated, it was beyond our scope. Like, I don't have any staff that can take care of that. So my first thing was, you don't feel good, you're going to the emergency. And thankfully they did because he wasn't okay. Um, but he was somewhere around in his 70s, so that is somewhere that we don't play with.

Yeah.

Uh, are we good to start?

I think we should do some segments. All right, it is segment time, segment time, segment time.

So we already made a pick.

Nice.

You were not here.

She's going for Generations Beauty because really So that's like 99% of my job.

And it's 99% of the world right now.

So you have 4 options. Growing up, work and play, family life, and big picture.

Family life.

Okay, so blue. You want to take a pick?

As I knock something over.

Oh, it's okay. Just drop everything off.

What is my favorite family memory? We used to go to Centre Island.

Nice.

Every summer.

Did you go to the nudie beach?

No.

Sorry, this is with your— this is with your parents?

This is with my parents.

So you would not go to the nude beach with your parents? Okay, no problem, no problem.

But Professor—

I'm just off the rails, guys. I'm sorry. But Centre Island is a lovely island.

It's lovely. It's a cute little But this was the first year that I took my kids.

Oh!

So it was the most, like, so much fun, and everything was exactly the same.

Yeah.

Except for like one or two little updates, and my kids were just thrilled with it.

They're like, I wanna take the boat across and everything. Yeah.

And the whole kit and caboodle.

Oh, that's awesome. Very magical. I just went to a bachelorette party a couple weekends ago, and we ordered a Well, ordered, whatever you call it. We booked this tiki hut thing that floats along the— sorry, it like floats around Toronto Island.

Yeah.

And it's heated. They serve you booze. We booked the entire tiki hut.

Booze.

Booze.

You can't bring your kids on the tiki hut to go to the island, but if you ever want— if you love the island so much, if you ever want to do something cool with your girlfriends, this tiki hut thing was the We had such a good time. It was great.

My go-to Hanlan's Point is, uh, my go-to point is Hanlan's Point.

Yeah, Hanlan's. Yeah, yeah, just a lot of free-flowing adrenaline there. I was a Toronto girly for like 10 years and hung out with all of the fabulous gays of the Village, so I spent a lot of time on the nude beach.

There wasn't a lot of fabulous gays growing up around here.

And not in North Bay.

Which makes you so sassy.

When you were in university, right?

Or 30.

Under me, we're like another. Yeah, that's tack on another 12 hours up.

Like geez Louise!

Are you going for this one as well, or do you want to?

Yeah. What do you feel?

I just I can't remember the colors again. So growing up, work and play. I'm not gonna go down family life because that will get into trauma again, and we might be crying. So no family life.

Free therapy.

I like big picture. I like big picture.

Okay.

What color red?

Red.

Okay, I hope I don't get the same one as last time, 'cause I went on a tangent. Oh, I like this one. What is different about growing up today than when you were a child? Everything.

Everything.

Literally everything. Everything. How do I begin this? So, I feel like we were the last generation to know what it was like to not have social media, right? Like, I didn't get Facebook until first-year university. It was still a social media platform that was just for college and university students.

Yep.

And so, those first like experiences using social media, I mean, I guess MySpace I did use a little bit, but I wasn't as much of an emo girly to have like my whole HTML with You know, your top 8 and whatever. This is aging me, but like, I was on MySpace, but I don't think I used it to its full whatever it was supposed to be used for. And so, sometimes I get those memory, like the Facebook memories that come back from like 13 years ago, and I was like, who was that person?

Listen.

Who was she?

So hard.

So, so hard.

She was confused.

She was finding herself. She was just figuring it out. Yeah, when I shaved my head, like, there was just lots of things, you know.

I've got an undercut and like the debate to like widen it or like do the side is so hard.

So I did. Yeah, just half of my head was shaved. You had short, short, short hair too at one time.

I shaved my head.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that was recent. That was when I was like 18.

Okay. Yeah, so that— I don't know if I was 18, but I was about 20, I don't know, 22 or 23 when that happened. So, social media obviously has infiltrated every corner of our beings. You can't escape it. Cell phone. My parents bought me a pay-as-you-go phone in grade 8 that you had to put money on, but if my parents didn't buy me a card for the thing, then it literally just sat on the counter and collected dust and ended up in the junk drawer. Yeah, same here. So, I didn't have much of a phone life. my first, like, cell phone bill until I was 22. Like, I didn't carry a phone around in my pocket until I was 22. So I would have been, like, second or third year university around that point. And even then, it was T9 texting.

Yes.

And you just didn't have that same sense of immediacy and urgency in the way that you would be able to be reached or the way that you would communicate with people, and you still did things where like, I'll meet you at this place at this time, and it wasn't like, I'm on my way, 5 minutes away.

Oh my God.

Just trying to find parking is bad. Oh man, I just got a ticket. Like, there's, you know, there was none of that, and so I feel like it was such a simpler time, but at the same time, even though it was simple, I did still think my life was a mess. Like, I thought my life was a mess, and it was so hard.

They're killing you. Until you are actually presented with said mess.

Yeah, exactly.

It's hard to know.

And I think it also— it would be— I would be remiss to not acknowledge the fact that, you know, when I was 14, 15, 16, 17, I thought I knew everything. I just thought I was the knower of all things. I knew everything. I knew what was right for me. I knew it was good for me. And like, in some ways, sure, you know, in some ways, sure, I was— I was a very According to, you know, whatever teachers and stuff, like, I was a very smart person, but I also did a lot of really dangerous things. Like, my parents thought I was at a slumber party at Ashley's, and I was like trashed in a cornfield. Like, you know, just drank a whole bottle of peach schnapps.

If my parents are listening to this, I was a good kid.

But the crazy thing, Sham, is that I was a good kid. There were people doing worse things than I was doing.

And you just happened to occasionally jump on the bandwagon.

Yes. Yeah, I said this in the last podcast too, is like, I knew everyone. Like, I wasn't part of one, you know, clique, so I got invited to the different parties and stuff. And I have major social anxiety that was obviously, you know, not properly diagnosed or treated or anything. So when I would get into these situations, I would drink so heavily that I would black out because it was my way of trying to calm my nerves and whatnot.

Yeah.

So, how are things differently? It's so hard to sum it up. I feel like it was a simple time, but it had its complexities. And thank God that there is not photo or video evidence of some of those cornfield bush parties because, like, I don't know.

Best, best, you know, oh my God moment for like social media. Um, I met my husband. So I was on Facebook, uh, my profile picture was of me at an underwear party.

I went to underwear parties too with the gay men.

Put this on the internet as my profile picture.

Good for you.

Your generation was truly not scared of the internet.

No, we didn't know that there was any— oh, what do you mean it's gonna be on people's apps forever? What is that called?

What about a digital blueprint?

I was gonna say your digital footprint or whatever. Yeah, yeah, no amount of deleting that off your phone is making it go anywhere.

But then it's like, oh.

I have all of my photo folders because remember back in the day you would go out to the bar with your digital camera? Yeah, and then you'd go home and you plug your digital camera into your laptop and then you would create 4 Facebook albums with 3,000 pictures, and you would hashtag it, best night ever, so trash. And then everybody would wake up in the morning and get mad at you.

What?

You posted that picture I didn't want you to post! Oh my God. Yeah, it was— so I have all of those still, but hidden. They're not available for the public to view. And I took screenshots of some pictures a little while back and I sent them to Sham, and she was like, this is epic. Yeah, I'm saving these all in a folder.

I'm like, they're, they're all on my drive.

Yeah, she's— I'm gonna use these sometime. I'll get your consent. I'm like, it is what it is.

The blackmail's coming.

Yeah, exactly. But you know what, I just hit a point.

The catsuit.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, full leather catsuit from head to toe. I still have that too, by the way. I can put that on after.

I hate to be the one-upper, No, be the one-upper. You used to pose nude. Woo! For one minute fifty-nine.

Make chapter notes.

Chapter notes.

Chapter notes on YouTube. Yeah.

For the art department for Lakehead for a year. I was eighteen.

Did they pay you?

Oh, it was the best paying job on campus.

Nice.

It's also the most painful job I've ever had.

You have to hold still.

You have to hold still, and you do not. You do not understand how stinks. still actually how hard— you don't realize how much you move.

You would start to sweat and stuff too, I would think.

You would start to sweat. And like, they were very professional about it. And you know, if you came off of the kind of stage thing, you put on your robe and whatever else. I'm like, whatever, I'm 18, it's not getting any better. And I was right.

I wish I had more photo evidence— any, not more. I wish I had any photo evidence of my body at that age because you think, I'm fine.

Oh my God.

Oh, my size 6 Jeans are right.

It's like, oh, when you and then the mum tum comes in, you're just like, yes.

See, I don't have kids, but I still have.

Well, you still have a uterus.

Do you? I still have a uterus. Exactly. Yeah. So this like punch that you can't like get rid of, it doesn't go anywhere.

It just gets worse.

Yeah. So that's how the world is changed.

It's like this. Sam's like, this is going in.

Excellent.

I'm gonna take a.

I'm gonna post it on Instagram.

Did that.

I post it too.

This is the best part. It's not like I've ever been quiet about this either.

No, I would shout it from the rooftops.

Well, because people like to assume that they know who I am, especially at work, right?

Right.

And again, like, you know, I've got my hair in a bun. They don't really see the undercut. If they haven't heard me curse, uh, where have you been?

She was a baddie.

A baddie.

I push some limits, but like, you know.

Yeah.

For the right reasons.

Yeah. And, you know, I think back to those times in my life and I just don't feel like I missed out on anything. I feel like I did it the right way. I feel— I just feel like I did it the right way. I feel very grateful for the experiences that I had and the partying that I did. And, you know, I got it out of my system. And now I'm like in my 30s and my hangovers are 4 days long. Like, I can't. I can't. Like, Drinking to me is— it's fun to do twice a year, like to sip a beer at the end of the week or whatever. Ryan's a big beer enthusiast, as you can tell, but we're not getting trashed on the weekends. I don't know how functioning adults who have lives and responsibilities, I don't know how you can be an alcoholic today.

You would be surprised.

Yes, I'm sure. That's what I was gonna say. I'm not saying it's impossible.

No, it's not. It's there.

But people are making it so possible. Yeah, there are a lot.

So many people. And again, pandemic just pushed everybody over the edge.

Well, I'm gonna quickly change because that felt like I was talking about my grandparents.

Okay, um, you chose resilience?

Yeah, I chose resilience. So it's getting to know you, goal setting, self-reflection, connected relationship, and self-care. I would let you guys pick.

Okay, I would like to— sorry, can I see them again? ADHD was not listening to you. Uh, I zoomed. I want to. We don't talk enough about this connected relationships.

Uh oh.

Dun dun dun. Which one is it?

Uh, yellow.

In your opinion, what makes someone a good person?

Wow. Holy shit.

That's heavy. Yeah.

Jesus.

There's there's a lot of avenues to take people. Wow. Don't Don't murder.

Don't murder. Yeah, a lot of paperwork.

Don't harm.

Don't—

we could write a book. It's a lot of paperwork. Page 1, don't murder. Don't harm children. Don't harm animals.

Step 1. Yeah, don't harm others.

Period.

Period.

Harm reduction.

Harm reduction. Absolutely.

Um, I think my standards are pretty low.

Stop.

Like, I just feel like on a general basis, if I if I don't if I don't feel like somebody's energy is good, I just don't entertain them at all.

Absolutely.

That's that intuition.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think I'm I'm think I think I'm a we're we're we're okay with swear words, but I think I'm an asshole when it comes to saying I don't care to people. So like if I if I feel like even if the slightest of things. I don't know. It's such a, it's such a, it's just in your head. You just know what you're not gonna vibe with, right? People body shaming is not it for me. I don't think it's funny to call someone. Ugh, I don't like how they look just because we can say it's not something I care for.

It's a red flag for me also.

That's that's just a no.

Yeah.

What what's the rule? If it's not something they can change about themselves in thirty seconds or less, don't comment on it.

Yeah.

Like don't make a comment.

Like just shut up. Like it's None of your business, especially when people are like dressed up and they immediately, ugh, she doesn't look.

It's like she's feeling herself.

What does it matter?

Yeah, I think these are some of the very basic things that just tells me, and it always happens at the very first interaction, like the moment because that person is trying to like whether they're trying to impress you or put a picture forward of who they are or just trying to connect with you, and they would say the most. Out of box thing, and I was like, listen, there's a very fine line between a joke and what you believe in.

Yeah.

And I think the moment the belief system's off, I'm like, I don't like you. Yeah.

And it's it's the same, right? Where you're just like, that's not funny.

Yeah. It's like you can be humorous as hell because I think I'm hilarious.

You are. You are.

But at the same time, I don't. I'm perfectly fine, like not being an asshole to people. So I think if I can do it, you can do it. Believe in yourself.

What a concept. Right. Oh my God.

Yeah.

Any other, any other characteristics you think define a good— like, treat others the way you want to be treated, of course.

Empathy.

Empathy.

I think people setting boundaries. Yeah, I love when people set clear boundaries. Like, I know I can push people's boundaries, absolutely, uh, but I also think it's so hard to respect other people's boundaries that it's such a good quality, you know?

Yeah, actually, I had coffee with Kira Yesterday. And in the spring, we had met her, and she had said that she was interested in working with OBM and whatever. So I followed up with her, and she was like, I really do want to work, but I have to set some really hard and fast boundaries with you. I will reach out to you when I'm ready, but I'm just focusing on— she was doing some wild MBA, like neurobiological something, some marketing, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I respect you so much.

Yeah.

Because a young person who was comfortable enough saying, like, comfortable to your— I hate that I'm like the senior or whatever in the dynamic, but it was like she felt so confident in saying like, I want to help you, but I'm not going to be able to help you until this. I'm setting healthy boundaries. I'm just focusing. I was like, when I sat down with her yesterday, I was like, I just want to tell you how much I respect you for setting such good boundaries. And sure enough, when I reached out to her in September, We scheduled coffee, and she was like, I just feel like I would not have been in the right headspace. I would not have been able to give you the time that you needed from me. And I was like, I wish more people would be more vocal about what they can and cannot do instead of just telling you that they're gonna do something and then not showing up, or telling you that they're gonna do something and then they flake.

Yeah.

I have a tattoo. I'm like, tell me how you really feel. Don't tell me what you think I want you to say. Don't tell me what you think I— what you think you think I want to hear. Like, just tell me how you really feel because I don't like reading between the lines. I don't like guessing where you're at. Like, tell me straight to the point.

Another thing would be like how quick people are to judge others based off of their belief system. And I'm like such a big advocate for like, leave your belief system where it's respected, that's in your house. Leave it there. The moment you step out onto the streets, you have to be like— especially it's like, I don't know if it was when you guys were growing up too, but right now, like, I think it's a necessity to be a big advocate for a lot of different groups.

Yes.

Whether it's like religious or like ethnicities or their sexuality or whatever, right? Like, all of those those identifications and just to be able to— but I still see like people just popping up and be like, oh yeah, no, it doesn't work that way, because they're like, what, 50 years old? Like, it doesn't even matter if it works with you anymore. And I think that is also like a big thing, right?

Yeah, I know, trying to project your beliefs or your opinions onto someone with the thought that you are right and your opinion is right alone, not understanding that we as humans don't all have to think the same way.

Professor and I joke about one of our board members. We call him the audacity.

Yeah, hashtag audacity. Hashtag audacity. Because he has a very different school of thought on leadership, and he's very authoritarian. He believes very much in it's black and white, where we do not believe that at all.

I mean, I respect his— I think there are certain aspects where it works.

Absolutely.

But I feel a lot of people won't— don't respect other people's belief systems either, and that's where—

And it's not like, you know, once we start getting to know a little bit about his belief systems and the way that he kind of believes in leadership, it's like, okay, well, you'll never be in charge of human resources here, but a very brilliant guy whose father, you know, runs a hospital in India, and he was brought up by a very, you know, physician who— and so he sees how his father has built his legacy. And so I can't, you know, I imagine that he wants to mirror the success that his father was able to achieve, and his father did so by being an authoritarian. So if that was the model you had to learn from, then—

Do you guys wanna jump into the next segment real quick?

Yeah, last one.

So we're doing Olive in the Piddle. Like I gave you a brief about it. So we're going to start with you. Sure.

I'll start with mine. Olive in the Pit. So the olive is the goodness, and the pit is the pits. So what was my olive this week? My olive this week— oh, the DIY corner. So there's a lot happening in the space that you see. Behind the camera, there's a lot happening in this space. So, it's just a much more functional space. We're trying to organize things. When you live in an open concept space, you can't hide anything. Like, everything is out in the open. So, you have to kind of have some order to the chaos. So, developing some order to the chaos, and I am the reason for the chaos. I am exclusively— I do not deny this. exclusive chaos contributor to this space, and it just feels really good to be having that starting to look like something that's an actual functional space where work, incredible work will be done. So that's the Olive. My pit, I haven't told you this this morning. I had a panic attack this morning at the post office.

Stop.

Full-on panic attack at the post office. I had one, remember the, the Attack that I had here, and I threw up on the side of the road. Same fucking thing happened to me at the post office this morning.

Awful.

Yeah. It was just the morning, and it's Monday, and I'm trying to catch up with things, and then I thought one person was scheduled. And normally, I can handle these things, and I'll figure it out, and I'll make it work. And the thing that tipped me over the edge, my stupid car. So if you leave the windows down and you take the keys with you, it starts, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. And so I'm in the post office and all of a sudden I start hearing that, wah, wah, wah. So I'm like, crap, I just gotta go run and throw my keys into the car. I'll be right back in a second. And so I ran, I threw the keys into the window. The window slit was this big.

Yeah.

Threw the keys in, the car locked. Car locked with my keys inside. Rant, rant, rant. Bringing the keys didn't stop the rant, rant, rant. And so I'm— my, my— I could feel my— I'm touching my head because this is what I do when I'm having an anxiety attack. I don't know why, it's just a comfort thing. But rant, rant, rant. And Olive's in the back seat because I left the windows all the way down. I was only running in for 5 seconds. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? The beeping just—

Yeah, it's the sound that's getting rid of it.

And so in 2 moments, I just— I was like, I gotta I climb into the backseat of the car, climb into the front to grab my keys where I stupidly threw them. The beeping was still happening. Olive is like, what are you doing back here? I step out of the car. I finally get the beeping to stop, and I just burst into tears.

Oh.

I burst into tears, and I was like, what is happening? What is happening? And then this woman came up to me, and I could start feeling my— like, I could start feeling my breathing, and my fingers started tingling, my toes started tingling again. The woman from the post office comes out. She's like, is everything okay? And then I'm like, I don't know what's happening. I don't know what's happening. I couldn't, like, for the love of me, I could not catch my breath. And I was like, I was fine. I was fine. I was fine. I don't know. Like, it's just the beeping from the car. And I couldn't get the car to stop beeping. And I just kept saying, the car was beeping. The car was— and the car started beeping again. And I'm like—

Oh, no.

And so then this guy from the post office comes out, and he's like, is everything okay? And I'm like, I'm just having a panic attack. It's fine, it's fine. I just live right there. I just need to get— I just need to— and it was like, I was so embarrassed. I felt so vulnerable. I was like, is this now gonna start happening more where just like random stupid shit is gonna happen, and I'm gonna have this crazy embarrassing like physical response to what's happening. Like, obviously, I have to talk to my therapist about this and whatever, but it sucked. Like, the post office guy had to like accompany me home, and like, yeah. I have never in my life felt like I couldn't collect myself, you know, in those moments of high stress or whatever, because we're in those moments of high stress all the time. I'm like, So in tune, so checked in, so responsible, so accountable when I'm in these high-stress situations at work, but something as stupid as a car horn going off.

It's because you're at the center of it, right? Right.

Yeah.

Fear of judgment, fear of being singled out, fear of being looked at. Yeah, right. And then the sound overwhelming.

Yeah.

And it was too much.

And not only that, but we've been so frustrated with this damn car because it did it to us a couple of times while we were at the cottage in August where we just wanted to go into this craft shop or whatever, you know, left the windows down. It was cool while we were at the cottage, it was fine for the dogs. Windows are all the way down, they, they know not to go anywhere. And so like 3 or 4 times over the weekend while we were gone, we couldn't do what we had planned to do because this fucking car wouldn't stop beeping every time we walked away from it. I don't know if it's some like safety feature on the car or whatever, but Anyways, my pit was this morning, and I don't like— I don't like— I don't like having those vulnerable moments in public. I'm such a private person.

No, I don't think anybody's ever comfortable having those moments, but I also think there was just a lot being piled up because I woke up to a bunch of text messages about today's update, and I was like, oh, are you okay? And I didn't even know that the car was going off on her.

But yeah, I was like, no, I'm not. And I was like, okay, let me just give her a call.

Yeah.

And like, shame, like I couldn't catch my breath. I'm sitting on the couch, she's like, take a deep breath. I'm like—

One more thing about Professor is that she forgets to eat. So yeah, I think that is a big trigger because I know a lot of friends of mine—

I drink all day. I drink all day, but food for me is— it feels like a waste of time.

Yeah, see, I have to tell healthcare workers to eat and drink.

Isn't that funny?

Isn't that funny?

It's because we're used to not getting any breaks.

Yeah, just like, like, for 14 hours. Yeah, no big deal. Yeah, I'm way better now about staying hydrated, but I'm very, very bad about remembering to eat. It's not a good thing. Snackies, little, little street snacks things.

Yeah, don't trust her with those.

She'll just leave them. Yeah, or I'll give it to someone else. You look hungry. Yeah.

I'm gonna start putting reminders on my phone.

It'll just call and be like, eat pizza.

Yeah, I did that to my husband. Yeah, because he'd come home and he— and, you know, he's on metformin, he's also on, um, Ozempic. So like the food suppression, like you're not hungry. So he'd come home and he's like, oh, I'm not feeling so good. I gotta— I'm like, did you eat today? He goes, no. Like, duh, I love you so much. I'm like, I'm literally just asking you to eat.

I know, that's all I'm asking you to do. This is the thing, right? Like Somebody else is having a panic attack, I'm there. I can help you. I know what you have to do. Find 5 things. What color are they? Whatever it is, whatever the strategy will be that I'll pull out of my hat in the moment, but to be able to apply that to yourself in the moment is so hard. So hard.

It's because it's you.

Yeah.

What about you? What about your Olive and Pit?

Olive and Pit.

So Olive was really good. So I actually have organized myself. I'm 6 days to go to Orlando for NurseCon, and I've got booth, and I'm gonna do the journals, and getting the book kind of up and going. And so everything's kind of like teed up and ready to rock and roll. Pitt, I had a case where I had to stay 2 hours extra over yesterday because of another pediatric patient.

Oh yeah.

Who was super sick, but again, happy that I did it. But it just, it kind of sucked because I'm like, you know, it was very last minute. All of a sudden it's 7 o'clock, you're like, uh, And days and nights is short, where days was we were doing okay. So they're like, uh, do you mind like taking the kid? I'm like, actually, I used to work at the pediatric hospital. I'll take them. I know the people. It's fine. She's been mine the whole time anyways, so I will, I will take. That's fine.

Yeah.

But again, it's— you get home and then it's just like, it's, it's 8. And like, so I— the kids— I get home by 9:30. Kids open up the door. The alarm is automatically Turned on at 9, so of course the alarm goes off and all the lights come on and it's blaring and the kids are trying to put in the pad, to put in the number and they're not quite getting it. And husband screams at the top of his lungs from upstairs, be like, who turned off the alarm? And I'm just like, oh God.

Your alarm, my car alarm, your house alarm. Turn off all the alarms in our lives. It sucks when the pits are like, you have to be at your place of employment. You can't avoid it, right? It's like—

And how do you create a safe boundary where me creating safe boundary potentially puts a child at risk?

Yeah.

Or puts somebody else who's not comfortable into potentially a very vulnerable situation where something could have really bad happened, and then they could have not been prepared. And then it turned into this whole situation. How do you take that on?

Yeah, it's such a— healthcare is such a gray area.

Well, because it's life and death.

Yeah, it's always like—

it's so black and white that it's gray. Yes.

Yeah, 100%. If it was anything other, and had I not been already 100%, like, had I not already known that the kid was kind of already up on the up and ups, but like still just like teetering, I would have been like, I'm probably okay to go. Whereas this, I was like, I can't, I can't put this on anybody else.

Yeah, there's just some of those cases.

And I was already on time and a half, which then knocked it into double time.

So I'm like, all right, I'm getting paid properly.

Finally making my hourly wage.

Yes.

So you know what? Yes, I will transfer.

Kind of an olive and a wee bit of a pit. And a pit. There's an olive and a pit kind of combo there. I love that.

It's an all-over kind of sitch. That's good.

You're up, girl. So when I started working last year, when I— well, first job here, my first orientation, first day at job, first person that I cared for, we were in an assisted living. And she immediately loved me. She was dementia. She loved me, stroke patient. and G-tube. So because, because of the supervisor, so there was like a lot of medical things that she wouldn't let anybody else do but me. So we had this amazing dynamic, and she would always try to hook me up with her grandson for some reason. That's the way it goes. Yeah, I loved her. I absolutely loved her. And yesterday evening, we got a call that she passed away. And usually we're getting emails about our residents, um, going to the hospital or stuff. And I'm— I was very up on it and I knew everybody who was at the hospital, but for some reason the night staff forgot to like send an email that she was going to the hospital. So I was like clueless. And I get this call and I don't pick it up because I was like, it's probably some shift and I don't wanna work it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I heard the voice note and my other supervisor said, hey Sham, I have some news.

And I was like, oh, uh-oh.

I was—

and my mind immediately went to, oh, one of people who were at the hospital, they probably— and because we have had a very bad year, and, um, it was her. And I didn't know she was sick, and I didn't know something was wrong.

And yeah, and it was just a bad, bad thing when it catches you out of the blue like that. It can sometimes take your breath away.

Yeah, because I, I I had no idea.

Like, anyway, uh, so that was the pit.

Obviously that was the pit.

Yeah, hope to hell that's—

geez.

Yeah, let's just take a moment.

That was the pit.

Take a moment. I'm sorry, Sham. That's sad.

Yeah, she was a— she was an amazing person. I, I loved her. And though, you know how sometimes dementia patients, they only remember you and you feel so special?

It's because it's how you made them Feel.

Yeah, and she always remembered my name. And I used to sneak because she was a G tube; she wasn't allowed to eat anything like solid. So I would sneak in some popsicles and like put things for her.

So yeah, well, okay.

Rest in peace.

Rest in peace.

My olive, my olive from the last time we recorded an episode isn't so different. But yesterday I just colored my hair again.

Nice.

Yeah. I feel like a baddie. It's like a plum. Like a plummy plum. I don't think you'll be able to see it now because of the dark. It looks really good in the sun.

Yeah, yeah, that was good.

Good self-care. You didn't cry. I was maybe hoping a wee little tear.

I don't know what's wrong.

There's something, there's something, there's something wrong with me. Like my grandma passed away and haven't cried yet.

Like, no, no, no, it's okay. I'm just saying we've cried. This could have been the Sisterhood of the Crying episode.

Quit it.

No, it's— I have not, I've not cried in a very long time.

You're a very strong person.

No, fair.

It's— I think it's just coping with cancer.

Disassociation.

You know what all I see is? I see shove it down.

Shove it. How deep will this go? Everything is fine. How deep will this go?

I was telling my friend yesterday after this happened, because we were still like— we were actively talking, uh, over text, and I told him, I was like, Hey, this person passed away, and I was like, okay, it's not. It's gonna hit now. It's gonna hit now. And then immediately I see myself texting everything's okay, and I'm like, oh, okay.

You shut yourself down.

Yeah, it's okay not to be okay. I was listening to that song actually after I had my panic attack this morning.

Well, that was an amazing episode.

That was an amazing episode. Oh my goodness! Okay, so plug your book one more time, please.

Nursing Intuition. How to trust your gut, save your sanity, and survive your career.

Okay, so we're trying to put two things. One is your playlist. Yes. Going in your shift. Obviously the link to your book.

Yes.

Excellent book. And where can people find you?

LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Nice website. Jennifer Johnson, BSN RN. Nurses don't come for me. There's just too many Jennifer Johnsons. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. That's funny because when I was trying to find you to like, where's all these Jennifer Johnsons?

There's just so many of us and they're nurses. It was a whole thing. Should have kept my maiden name.

Um, what was your maiden name?

Summers.

Oh, I love it.

Oh my goodness.

So my kids have figured out my maiden name, so now it's Jennifer Ann Summers. I'm like, that's not me right now.

It sounds like a character from like 90210 or something.

100%.

Jennifer Summers.

Oh my God, yeah, 100%. So they think it's hilarious.

Yeah, I think it's hilarious. Oh my goodness.

LinkedIn is Jennifer Jennifer Johnson BSN RN. You can find my Amazon page Jennifer A Johnson RN to preorder the book, to preorder the books. I've got journals about grief and wellness and a couple of other things kind of in the mix. Rx for growth, so prescriptionforgrowth.com is my website. LinkedIn or not. LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram is all over the—

wow, good for you, girl. Yes, this is the thing, it's just like you have to because this is how you gain exposure. I'm on the same train right now.

So Instagram and TikTok is @ernurse.jenn. J-E-N-N. Beautiful. We'll put all that up for like goofy, goofy bullshit. Just because like, what else? Hashtag acopia.

Oh my goodness. This is an incredible episode. Everybody, this is the All of You podcast where we sit down with all of you, and today we extended the olive branch to the intuitive nurse. Thank you so much for listening if you've made it this far.

Thank you.

Trigger warnings all throughout. We have to talk about this stuff. We have to normalize these conversations. We can't pretend like these things aren't happening in healthcare because they are, and I think the more we expose And the more we share, and the more we bring this to the forefront, I think the general population and young people emerging will understand this stuff. So I appreciate you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.