Hear about two nurse educators who are leading and teaching the next generation of nurses. Patricia Davidson, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and Kimberly Dudas, Chair and Assistant Professor of Nursing at New Jersey City University talk about the current status of nursing education and what is in store for the future.

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Jamie Davis:         Kim and Patricia, I want to welcome you to Nursing Notes Live and really I am excited to talk about this topic this time of year, getting started talking about nursing education.

Kimberly Dudas:       Oh, it’s an exciting time of the year for us. It’s a very busy time, but it’s a wonderful time of the year. It’s encouraging and it’s kind of a chance to start afresh each year.

Patricia Davidson:   Yes, I agree, Kimberly. It’s great to be walking around the school and seeing all this eager and excited faces. I’m really optimistic about the year ahead.

Kimberly:             Yes.

Jamie:                   So, Kim, why don’t you share with me a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse? I always ask that question first.

Kimberly:             I actually don’t think there was ever a time that I didn’t think that I would be a nurse. I recall from a very young age nursing animals and nursing whoever happened to be sick in my vicinity and it just seemed like a very natural thing for me to do. So I think from a very young age I knew that and I geared my coursework all along to prepare myself to enter a baccalaureate program. So for me it was kind of intuitive from a very young age.

Jamie:                   Patricia, how about you?

Kimberly:             Well, I’m a bit the opposite. I had not really thought about nursing as a career and had started off university and did a year of really doing political science and sociology, et cetera. I didn’t really found real attraction in what I was studying. And then I was just working with a woman who was going nursing. And when she started to talk to me about it, I thought, “Maybe I’ll have a look into that.” To cut a long story short, that was being the best decision of my life because very quickly I realized that this was the career for me and I was fortunate to be – I had the opportunity to undertake this phenomenal career.

Patricia:               I would have to say that I agree. Nursing is a phenomenal profession to be in and I have never ever regretted my decision ever.

Jamie:                   So, Patricia, we are having all of these new nurses coming into the school system as they try to enter the nursing field. A lot of times because they’re coming from other degree positions and other programs, just like yourself, kind of shifting gears midstream, do you see that as a negative or do they bring a lot to the table from their previous career or previous ideas of what direction your life’s going to take?

Patricia:               Well, I think really they bring a huge amount to the table. Here at Johns Hopkins, all of our students have a baccalaureate degree and a good number actually had a master’s degree. So these are people who, for a range of reasons, have decided that nursing is a good career option. So because this makes it very thoughtful, intentional decision, it’s not something that they’ve just sort of fallen into out of school because of career or counsel have might suggested it. It really comes with a commitment to doing this amazing job that we call nursing.

Get a sneak peek into the September issue of Nursing Notes, which will highlight nurse educators and be distributed in mid-September. In this episode, I sit down with our Get to Know nurse Susan Kohl Malone who is currently working on her Ph.D. in hopes of becoming an independent nurse scientist. I also shared questions with her from current nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast. To learn more about Susan, be sure to check out her “A Day in the Life” video on the JNJDiscoverNursing YouTube channel.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Susan, and welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you join us on the show this time around.

Susan Malone:   Hi, Jamie! Thank you. It’s great to be here. It’s my pleasure.

Jamie:                   So, Susan, I always ask our nurse guests to share with us a little bit about why they wanted to become a nurse. We have a lot of student nurses and people thinking about nursing careers listening to this. What was it that drew you to nursing as a profession?

Susan:                  That’s a great question. I was in high school and I liked everything. So I didn’t really have – I think sometimes some people really know right from very early age is that they wanted to be a nurse. That wasn’t necessarily me. I liked everything that I did. So it made choosing a career rather difficult. But one thing that happened in high school as I started teaching swimming lessons at our local YMCA and it was that experience that really made me realize how much I loved working with people and that whatever I decided to do in a future career that was a critical component, to be able to work with people and to be able to make some kind of difference in their lives. So I kind of knew that about myself during my later years in high school. My mother was a nurse and my older sister had just started her undergraduate degree pursuing a BSN. So I talked with my mother about it and she told me that if I was a nurse there would be a lot of opportunities and teaching would be one of those. So I went with what my mother said and she was right.

Jamie:                   Yes, it’s really interesting. I was originally a paramedic and before that I was a journalist, before I got into nursing school. As we went through school, I was amazed at the multitude of opportunities that nurses find for themselves as ways to help patients and help clients and help individuals and communities become healthier and well in many different ways.

Susan:                  Yes, and it’s a very flexible career which makes it particularly attractive also.

Jamie:                   So tell us a little bit – you’re a nurse educator now, but what was your progression of your career like that it got you to the point where you said, “I want to be a nurse educator”?

Susan:                  Yes. Well, again, I really knew that it was the teaching component that was very attractive to me. So I never really kind of let go of that. There had to be some teaching piece in whatever I did. So I was finishing my undergraduate degree and I was working at the time also in the graduate school of nursing where I was pursuing my undergraduate degree. I was getting really worried because I didn’t really think that acute care work was necessarily my calling and it seemed that most people were going along that track. So I got some really good guidance from the office there and they encouraged me that if teaching was something I wa...

Get to know Regina Wysocki, a school nurse and an alumna of the Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Program. Regina’s also the author of the 21st Century Nurse blog. Hear what she has to say about cultural awareness in nursing, and listen to questions from nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Regina and welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show with us today.

Regina Wysocki:       Hi, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Jamie:                   So I always ask our nurses, as a first question that kind of lead things off, to tell everybody little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse. What was it that drove you to choose this as your career?

Regina:                Well, I didn’t start out originally wanting to be a nurse. I had gone to college with not really a specific major in mind then kind of drifted around in a couple different things. I thought about being a physician. I was interested in social work. I was interested in art history. So I kind of change my major multiple times and then finally settled on nursing. My mom is a nurse. So I think that probably might have influenced my decision a little bit. I think initially I didn’t want to be a nurse just because I thought I wanted to do something different than what my mom had done. But once I finally made the decision to go to nursing school, it took a couple of years. I knew I wanted to go to a bachelor’s program. I wanted to go to a university program and get my bachelor’s degree, but I hadn’t really had the most stellar academic and career before then. So I had to retake some classes, kind of get my GPA up. Then I finally got accepted into two nursing programs. One was at UTMB in in Galveston, where I ended up going, and then I also got accepted into a UT program in San Antonio. So at the last minute I kind of had to decide and see which school I wanted to go to, but ultimately I chose Galveston.

Jamie:                   Now, tell us a little bit about the progression of your career from where you started in nursing and what led you to getting into school nursing.

Regina:                Sure. When I first got out of school, there was a big group of us friends that had all been in school together. We all went down to South Texas. We were recruited to work at a hospital down there. I actually originally wanted to be an OR nurse because I had taken an elective in Nursing School and I thought the operating room looks like a really interesting place to work. So I interviewed for a position in the OR but I didn’t get the job. Instead, they offered me a position in the ICU. It was a small ICU. It was more like a combination of maybe a cardiac care unit and an ICU and initially I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to work in the ICU right out of school, but I ended up taking the job and really liked it. I like ICU a lot more than I thought I would. So we stayed there for a little bit and then I got married and my husband, we went to nursing school together. We had traveled down to South Texas together, but we got married and we ended up in the Houston area. We had friends who worked at the Texas Medical Center. I got a job in the Shock Trauma ICU which I loved. I really enjoyed that. I learned so much. It was a great experience as far as seeing all the different types of patients and stuff like that. So I did that for a couple of years and then kind o...

Meet two nurse educators who are teaching the next generation of nurses about cultural awareness. Hear what Margarita Trevino, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing and the director of the Center for Hispanic Studies in Nursing and Health, and Julie Mattingly, an assistant professor of transcultural nursing at Methodist College in Peoria, Illinois have to say.

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Jamie Davis:        Julie, Margarita, I want to welcome you to Nursing Notes Live and thank you very much for taking some time out of your busy schedules this summer and coming on the show to talk about what we’re going to be discussing today, which is cultural competency in nursing. Before we get started with that, though, I’d like to ask each of you, and I’ll start with Julie, tell us a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse and how your education and career progressed that brought you to where you are today?

Julie Mattingly:  Okay. Well, first, thanks for having me on the program. I’ve been a nurse for 22 years and I always knew that I wanted to do something in the healthcare field, but it wasn’t until I was a junior in high school and had the opportunity to do a day with a college on a clinical floor. It was called “Nurse for a Day,” where I got to see the student nurses in action. What really helped push me into nursing is, I remembered this visibly, the student nurses were caring for a patient who was a postman, a mailman who walked to deliver mail, and he had been trimming a tree and fell out of the tree and broke both of his legs. I remember going into his room with the student nurses and him telling me about his daughters that were nurses and how fantastic the profession was and how pleased that they were with their decision to become nurses. That for me pushed me into nursing as opposed to something else in the healthcare field. I am originally from Louisville, Kentucky and finished my Bachelor’s degree in South Carolina. My husband is retired from the Navy and I moved around a lot during my beginning career as a nurse, moved about every two or three years. My very first nursing job was on the island of Guam and then in Northern California and then in the Northeast. For me, I originally started out in the acute care setting, but after I had a child, I found that I needed something with a little bit more flexibility and went into Community Health Nursing and really found my passion there and have become interested in underserved populations and community wellness and health promotion. I have been teaching in a Bachelor’s program for about five years now.

Jamie:                   Fantastic. It sounds like you had quite a broad range of experience there with moving around and going to different facilities and things, but really finally found your passion after trying out something a little different.

Julie:                    Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I try to tell students is don’t give up on the profession. If you find yourself in a position after graduating from school, and maybe it’s not what you wanted to be, that there are so many options in nursing that you just need to continue to look because there is something for you. You were drawn to nursing for a reason and you just have to find your niche and sometimes it does take a little bit of time.

Jamie:                   Great. Margarita, how about you? Why did you want to become a nurse and how did you get to where you are today?...

Two critical care nurses are here to kick off our panel discussion. Hear what Karen McQuillan, a clinical nurse specialist at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore and the president-elect of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN), and Heather Morey, a nurse manager at the Munroe Regional Medical Center ICU in Ocala, Florida and a four-time recipient of the AACN Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence have to say.

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Jamie Davis:         Heather and Karen, I want to welcome you both to Nursing Notes Live and I guess I’ll start off with my first traditional question for our guests and Heather I’ll start with you. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse and how that educational process progressed, what you career through school was like?

Heather Morey:  I actually was in school to be a teacher. I wasn’t looking at nursing at all. My mother got very sick and she was in the hospital for probably a month. I was actually just starting school, just starting college at that time so I was going to the hospital before classes, go to the hospital after classes, doing my homework there and saw the interactions that the nurses had with her. And during her hospital stay, I realized that this is what I want to do. I had to change colleges [Laughter] and go to nursing school. I was working fulltime and go to the school part-time. So my ADN degree actually took me about five years to obtain. But once I got that, I never looked back. It was worth the struggle. I was having all of my friends be done with school before I was, to know that it was something that I accomplished on my own.

Jamie:                   Fantastic. How about you Karen? Why did you want to become a nurse?

Karen McQuillan:     Well, I started off by going to school at University of Maryland, College Park. It was near my home and reasonably priced since I live in the state of Maryland. It was a very good college. I started going there and taking classes. Initially, my thought was – is that I wanted to be a Marine biologist and about a year in to school I thought, “I don’t know about being a Marine biologist. I really like to do something where I could help people more rather than just study Marine Biology.” So I actually had lots of the prerequisites started since many are the similar science-type classes that I would need for nursing school. So I finished my prerequisites at the University of Maryland in College Park, and transferred to the nursing school University of Maryland in Baltimore and finished my two years of nursing there to get my BSN. From there, I actually entered nursing and I entered at a community hospital in critical care medical-surgical unit. I just absolutely loved it. I knew immediately I had made a really great career choice and as I spent years working there it’s sort of became apparent that there was still so much more to learn. It’s “the more you know the more you figure out you don’t know.” So I decided to go back to school really to just better understand what was going on with my patients so that I could better take care of them. So I went back and got my Master’s degree in Trauma-Critical Care Nursing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I learned an incredible amount. It was an absolutely wonderful program. I actually became a clinical nurse specialist. I have been doing that job for a number of years.

This month we are looking at critical care nursing. In this episode of the Nursing Notes Live podcast, I sit down with our Get to Know Nurse Steven Neher. Steven is a flight nurse and advanced practice RN. He’s also president of the Air and Surface Transport Nurses Association. I talk with Steven about his career in critical care and transport nursing, and also shared questions from current nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Steve and welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show.

Steven Neher:     Well, thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it.

Jamie:                   So I always ask the same first question to everybody that I have on the show and that question is why did you want to become a nurse? What drew you to nursing care?

Steven:                 Well, probably back when I was in college, I took an EMT course. I’m a people-person. I always like to help people and probably just getting involved in that first EMT course is what kind of got me into medicine and nursing.

Jamie:                   What about your progression of your education? You obviously got your EMT certification and did that for a while but where did you go to school? What was your education like? Did you start out with an Associate degree program or did you jump right in to a BSN program?

Steven:                 Well, sure. I actually went to a small school for just a two-year degree and actually didn’t know what I wanted to do. I actually worked for a small ambulance service as an EMT just as a way of having income while I went to school. Well, it was through that experience that I had more experience with – engaging with the flight crews and transport teams and things like that and talking with people in the emergency room and ICU when we deliver patients on ambulance service. That’s how I knew I wanted to go to school and be a nurse. At that time, it was really competitive. So I actually had to put my application out and get actually accepted in CSU University because I wanted to get a four-year degree. So I moved to Colorado. I went to UFC and got my BSN at the university.

Jamie:                   Did you go on and get an advanced degree at some point in your career?

Steven:                 Yes. Ten years later, being a nurse and working in the ER, working in the ICU, in different areas, I just wanted to challenge myself even more and I’m always just kind of hungry for information. I actually went and became a nurse practitioner as well.

Jamie:                   Fantastic. Now, we were talking about critical care nursing this month on the show. You’re a critical nurse but you’re a special kind of critical care nurse. You’re involved with transport care as a flight nurse. That’s a really different kind of specialty. Tell us a little bit about what drew you to that particular area of nursing care?

Steven:                 Sure. I’ve been a transport nurse for about 15 years. What drew me probably is the complex cases that you see. When you’re calling a transport team you’re usually taking that patient to a higher level of care either from a small community hospital to a large community hospital or you’re taking them to a specialty center like a place where they do cardiovascular surgery or they have a special neurosurgeon or maybe a trauma ...

Meet Dylan Green, author of “The Second Career Nurse” blog and a practicing ER nurse for almost two years, and Patrick Hopkins, Co-Director for the Accelerated Program for Non-Nurses and an Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing at the University of Rochester School of Nursing. He’s also a Pediatric/Neonatal Advanced Practice Nurse at the Golisano Children’s Hospital.  Here’s what they have to say.

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Jamie Davis:         Dylan and Patrick, I want to welcome both of you to our recording here of Nursing Notes Live, it’s great to have you both on the how.

Both:                     Thank you for having us.

Jamie:                   We’ll start with you, Patrick. Just if you’d like to share with us a little bit about your background in nursing, why you wanted to become a nurse and a little bit about the career path that’s brought you to where you are today.

Patrick Hopkins:                 So I actually went to school to become a clinical biochemist and finished that degree and realized that I was not going to have any contact with the people whose samples I was going to be running in the lab. I had come over to the United States in a student exchange program and ended up working with mentally ill, developmentally-challenged adults and realized that I loved doing that. I loved the interaction. I get that before finishing my degree program in England. So I went back home, finished the degree, and after I came back to the US and taught the same population for three years. During that time, I found myself gravitating towards the nursing office. I was one of the people that got chosen to take the clients for their follow-up appointments. After three years, the visa ran out and I went back home to England and decided I was going to volunteer in a hospice. So I volunteered in a hospice for a short while. Applied to and got into nursing school and got a nursing degree from St. James University Hospital in Britain. It was at the time the largest teaching hospital in Europe. Midway through though, I got married to a woman from America and she didn’t want to live in England. So I came over to the US and worked with developmentally challenged children for five years in a nursing role. When my own kids were born, we moved to Rochester to be close to grandparents and I got a job over at the local hospital, which is affiliated with the University. I decided to stay with pediatrics because that’s where I’ve had the most experience. I ended up being hired for a position in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I have now been there over 20 years. After I’ve been there for about four years, I started the Master’s Pediatric Nurse Practitioner program doing that part time, completed that, and then afterwards went on and started to do a post-Masters NNP program and completed that in 2001. I started actually down the PhD path. My nine-year-old daughter at the time said, “Dad, do you need to do this, to keep doing what you do?” My response was, “No.” She said, “Well, do you love what you do?” And I said, ‘Yes.” She said to me, “Dad, please don’t go back to school. When you’re in school, you’re here but you’re not home.” So I waited until she was 15 and then got roped in to doing a DNP, which I completed in 2009. Just prior to completing the DNP, got asked to come over to the school of nursing here and teach. Initially, I was only teaching Master’s level students. Then I was asked to teach some of our accelerated students and found out that I really like the ...

Sit down with our Get to Know Nurse Chris Fogarty. Chris is a 2013 Graduate of Kent State’s accelerated BSN program and currently works in the intensive care unit at Mercy Medical Center in Canton, OH as a staff RN. I ask him about his shift to a career in nursing and also shared questions from current nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Chris! Welcome to Nursing Notes Live. I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy schedule to sit down and chat with me.

Chris Fogarty:      No problem. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jamie:                   So the first question I always ask is to ask people why they wanted to become a nurse and, especially, this time around because we’re talking about nurses and second careers. Curious, what drew you to the nursing field?

Chris:                    Well, that’s a great question. I started my career in customer service. I worked in manufacturing, customer service environment, customer support warranty, et cetera. I think I always knew that I like working with people, but the medical aspect of nursing, working with people’s lives, it kind of scared me. But it was really the service aspect that ultimately drew me in nursing and then you realize that helping people in a genuine and very caring way was probably the biggest draw for me.

Jamie:                   What was your process for going back to nursing school? Did you go through an ABN program, a BSN program? Tell us a little bit about your educational background.

Chris:                    Sure. I went through the Accelerated Bachelor of Nursing program at Kent State University. I had a previous required Bachelor of Arts in History through a small liberal arts school. When I decided to go back to school, I knew that I wanted to pursue the bachelor’s degree because most hospitals are looking out for nurses with their bachelor-prepared degrees. So I got my pre-requisites at a community college in Kent, Ohio. I was accepted into the Accelerated BSN program, which at Kent State is about 16 months. I completed that in May 2013. I passed boards and now practicing as an RN. So it is BSN-prepared.

Jamie:                   What were some of the things you ran into going back to school? Sometimes that can be a challenge. I know it was for me kind of putting my life on hold and really uprooting a lot of the things I had going on to take the time out of my life that’s required for going through school.

Chris:                    That’s an excellent question. It started out – the process got rolling because I lost my job in 2010. I was managing a customer service department at a small manufacturing company and that job was eliminated. So I found myself – my wife and I was asking, “What’s the next step?” After looking at different options, I had a friend who had attended Akron University’s Accelerated BSN program, he said, “You should check it out.” I was hesitant but I thought, “Well, I’ll go ahead and give it a shot. At least, explore the options.” So I did some home healthcare. I really liked the service aspect like I mentioned before. I started looking from there and when I – we did literally, like you did, uprooted our family. We live in my hometown on the west side of Ohio. We moved back to my wife’s in the town of Kenton on the east side. We have five kids now but our fourth had just been born.

Meet Bonnie Jennings, professor of nursing at Emory University Nell Hdgson Woodruff School of Nursing in Atlanta, Georgia. She served as a nurse in the U.S. Army for many years, eventually retiring at the rank of Colonel. We are also joined by Larry Lemos, president of the Nurses Organization of Veterans Affairs and a nursing officer/supervisor at the Veterans Affairs Long Beach Healthcare System in Long Beach, California. Here’s what they have to say.

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Jamie Davis:         Bonnie and Larry, thank you for coming on Nursing Notes Live and joining us for our show today. So I’d like to start off with the first question I always ask our nurses here on the show – everybody who listens will probably know what I’m getting ready to say – but we’ll start with your, Bonnie. Tell us a little about why you wanted to become a nurse and give a brief rundown of how you were educated and what your career looked like to date.

Bonnie Jennings:     That’s interesting, always looking backwards. So why I wanted to become a nurse, the answer is a little bit trite. I think it goes to the heart of helping others and caring. Something about healthcare really intrigued me. Engineering, Architecture, something that would be related to landscaping, business those things didn’t flip my switch. But what really intrigued me was the health aspect. I think that was borne from two key people in my life. My maternal grandmother had very severe diabetes. She wound up with a leg amputated and I watched all that. We helped with her care and I thought, “Truly, even as a child, isn’t there a way to do this better?” My dad died when I was 16. He had cancer. He was sick for quite a long time. We did most of his care at home and I was very much a part of that. Then even when he was hospitalized, watching the way nurses – and I think it really was nurses more than physicians – interacted with, assist the family and with my dad. All of that, as well as books I read about famous nurses and people in healthcare, the whole notion of healthcare just very much intrigued me. And, of course, I’m of an age that there were fewer career opportunities for women, so that affected my choices. But also while doors to medicine were opening up, I quickly realized that the disease focus of medicine was not what I wanted to do. The caring-people component, where my heart and soul resided in, that’s the passion I pursued. You also asked about my education. So very quickly with that, again, based on my age, it was at a time where things were shifting from diploma programs to BSN programs and a friend, who was diploma-educated, advised me, she said, “No, don’t get a diploma. The way the world is going, you need to be a BSN-prepared nurse.” And I feel so fortunate because, at that point in time, I think I got the best of both worlds – the very scholarly academic background, but still lots of interface with procedures both in acute care settings, as well as, the community and following patients in their homes. So I loved my BSN program. I think it really was very good. And somehow through that, and I have tried to track and identify why but I can’t, I believe a professor and instructor must have made mention at some point about the importance of ongoing education. I reached out after practicing for a few years and I went on to get my Master’s degrees and then I have always been interested in research. So it was very natural for me to, some years later,

Get to know nurse Captain Estacy Porter, the public health nurse officer in charge at the 14th Combat Support Hospital in Fort Benning, Georgia. Hear about Captain Porter’s military career in nursing and questions from nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Estacy and welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show with us today.

Estacy Porter:                    Oh, thank you, Jamie, for having me.

Jamie:                   So I always ask our nurses on the show to share a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse. So if you like to just tell us what drew you to nursing as a career, a little bit about your background.

Estacy:       I think my very first experience or what drew me into nursing was, well, watching my mother. My mother was not a nurse but she’s like working as a home health aid in New York and I would always watch and see her caring for the older population and so I knew that when I got older that I want to do something similar to that but expound a little bit more and nursing was to seal that, fell in love with or attracted me.

Jamie:                   So I know you’re in the military, our subject this month is talking about nursing in the military and tell us a little bit about your career progression in the military and how you moved into nursing school and beyond.

Estacy:       Okay. So when I graduated from high school, I wanted to join the military and I wanted to join in the healthcare field, nursing. So I went up to the recruiter, they did not have nursing available at that time. And so he showed me another field which was chemical, biological and nuclear specialist and he showed me a picture of somebody working. And the lab called and said, “You know this is something similar to nursing.” So I said, “Okay, fine, great.” So for 13 years, I did that and somewhere around that year, I found out that the Army had a program where they would fund you to go to nursing school for two years and once you get your bachelor’s, then you can come in as a commissioned officer, second lieutenant. So I jumped on that opportunity and said, “Wow, the opportunity, I’ll be able to pursue my passion. Not that I didn’t like the battlefield but I kind of got used to it and kind of forgot about the nursing thing. So, anyway, I went to school and pursued nursing with Old Dominion University in Norfolk. Oh, wow, the opportunity has just have been open ever since then.

Jamie:                   That’s great. You’re a captain, now, right?

Estacy:       Yes. I am a captain. I’m a captain in the Army. Once I became a nurse, I went to – the beautiful thing about the Army is when you become commissioned and as a nurse, they take you to a preceptorship or an intro to officership in nursing. So I went to San Antonio for two weeks and we kind of got introduced on how to become an officer or what the expectations as an officer is and as an Army Nurse Corps officer. I went there and I started off as a med-surg nurse in Augusta, Georgia. I loved it. That’s why I was able to build up all my skills and foundation in nursing. From there, I went to Korea and I became a Public Health Nurse right before that. So I loved med-surg but I knew my passion lies because I’m a public health nurse. I really felt that it’s important to focus on preventive care. What is it that I can do for you to prevent you from getting into the hospital. So I loved the education and the counseling and teaching that to my patients so that they can have inform...