Nursing Notes Live looks at nurse entrepreneurs. Our panel discussion is joined by Patricia Bemis, President of the National Nurses In Business Association, LeaRae  Keyes, Executive Director of the Nurse Entrepreneur Network and Victoria Powell, founder and current President of VP Medical Consulting. I spoke with them about nurses in business and entrepreneurial positions.

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LeaRae, tell us a little bit about what you did when you decided to move out and work on your own and how that developed.

LeaRae:                I have to backtrack a little bit more to probably the early ‘80s when I decided to go into sales because I wanted to be paid more for what I produced than a straight salary. Within six months of getting into sales, I won the national sales award for that company by applying the nursing process to sales which is basically assess, diagnose, plan, implement and evaluate. I found that by applying that process to sales, I was able to quickly soar above the other people who were in sales. I later became a marketing director for a rehabilitation company and I have a staff for which I was responsible. I became a full-time case manager in 1989 and then decided to start my own case management company in 1998. After several Intrapreneurships – an intrapreneurship is starting a division or a company within a company. I did that at least three times: trying a work comp rehabilitation model and applying a work comp case management model to catastrophic case management in healthcare; and then applying a case management model and starting a telephonic case management company. I can that with nurses who wanted to own their own a company or had a company but lack the skills in sales and marketing skills. I decided to start the Nurse Entrepreneur Network which provides lots of information on sales and marketing skills for nurses. It provides other information but it really focuses on sales and marketing.

Jamie:                  LeaRae, I like what you said about applying a nursing process, your critical thinking aspect of nursing to something that’s not nursing-centered or not patient-focused but really focusing on business. It’s very interesting that you found a way to apply that in other aspects of your life.

LeaRae:                Yes. I think a lot of nurses don’t realize that they already have a lot of the skills and tools they need to go into business.

Victoria:                I agree with LeaRae. I think the biggest thing that nurses are missing is not the critical thinking to get started in business but just the marketing and sales and asking for the business. That’s where nurses fall short.

Jamie:                  I think it’s not uncommon. We’re not very good at tooting our own horns. We’re all about everyone else, right? That’s why we became nurses. We’re caring people. It’s hard to be the person who goes out and says, “Look what I’m doing. I can offer you something.” That’s not really something that we focus on in nursing very often.

Victoria:                We’re educators. We like to share and we like to teach and that comes pretty naturally to most of us. But we don’t toot our own horns and I think we should do that more often.

Jamie:                  Pat, tell me a little bit about how you got into being a nurse entrepreneur initially and then taking that nursing education focus that we have and offering some assistance and putting together this opportunity to help other nurses.

In this month’s episode, Nursing Notes Lives looks at nurse entrepreneurs. This month’s featured Get-To-Know nurse, Sharon Rogone, uses her experience as a NICU nurse to create specialty products to improve care for these tiny patients with her business “Small Beginnings.” I asked her how she decided to become a nurse and what led her to branch out on her own with a new patient care innovation.

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Sharon:                 When I was a kid I was a candy striper. I was always fascinated by medicine and science. I looked at nursing as a way of helping people. The candy striper, you do all the dirty jobs. That you watch all the people do all the great things that they do for people and that’s where I wanted to go.

Jamie:                  Where did you go to school and how did that progressed? Did you start off in an RN program or did you go right into a BSN program? I know this was a few years ago.

Sharon:                 Well, I got married young. I started back to school actually when I was in my late thirties. I became an LVN first. Then I went into a RN program. I got my Associate degree and I do not have a BSN. I found neonatal nursing when I was in LVN and I worked in the unit as an LVN and was taking on greater responsibilities because I was good and passionate about what I did in there. That’s when I decided to go back to school and get my RN. Like I said, I was very passionate about “Do no harm” that’s an oath that we take as nurses. Nurses are out there without the tools to do no harm and that bothered me greatly. That’s why I started doing things to make the job better for the baby, better for the nurses and cost-effective. If you don’t make them cost-effective, then you’re not going to do any good. If they’re too labor-intensive to make, your products aren’t going to get on the market because the units are not going to buy them.

Jamie:                  We see a lot of nurses out there and people listening to the show are going to be nodding their heads, I know, when they think about this. But we’re constantly innovating, making do with the tools that we have to adapt them to a new task or job that they weren’t originally intended to be used for simply because we have a need to fill. Many times you sit there and you scratch your head and go, “Wow! I wish there was a better way to do this,” and you did that. I looked at your first product you ever came up with called the “Bili-Bonnet Phototherapy Mask.” A lot of people may know what the phototherapy mask is but why don’t you tell us a little bit about what your thought-process was when you first came up with this idea and what exactly it does – the advantages it brings over what was there before?

Sharon:                 Okay. When I was in the unit, it was a long time ago, there were very few products for the babies. We used to cut black construction paper in a shape of a mask and put cotton balls or eye pads behind it and use stockinettes from the ortho unit to make little hats to hold it in place. Gradually, the bigger companies started coming out with products that were not easy for the nurse to use, didn’t stay in place well. I came up with this idea of using the burn net and making it into a bonnet. I was making them by hand for myself. Other nurses started seeing, “Could you make me one of those?” It just kind of grew from there, just kind of snowballed. I just had one product that started my business with about $3,000.00 and it just kind of snowballed.

We got the chance to speak with Gillian Cilibrasi and Lisa Sunshine of the Urban Zen Foundation Integrative Therapy Program and then join me as I talk to nurses Liz Lattuga, Patti Heidmann, Jennifer Owens, and Debra Cappock-Clegg, all recent winners of the Johnson & Johnson Campaign for Nursing’s Future/Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program nurse scholarship.

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Jamie:     We’ll start off with you, Lisa, tell us a little bit about your background.

Lisa:    My background is in creating awareness for non-profit campaigns. My first one was the ONE Campaign for Bono and I come to Urban Zen which is Donna Karan’s fashion designers non-profit organization. Together Gillian and I work with – Donna’s created a program that trains nurses, allied health care workers and people from the Yoga community in a variety of Eastern Healing modalities. My function is to let people know what we’re doing and how to get involved.

Jamie:    Gillian, how about you?

Gillian:    Well, I’m the program director for the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program. My background is a combination of business and healing health care workers. So I’ve been a body worker and massage therapist in the state of New York for more than 15 years and I have a strong Yoga background and went through the program myself and liked [unintelligible] involved and that’s how I became the program director.

Jamie:    Let’s talk a little bit about what the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program is. What do you expect when a health care professional comes in and takes the type of a training? What do you want them to learn and take away from it?

Gillian:    What we do is we train in five different modalities. We trained them modalities with yoga therapy, essential oil therapy, Reiki – which is a form of energy work that can be done hands-on or hands-off, and we train contemplative care or [unintelligible] practices and in nutrition. We use those modalities to create if you will a tool belt so that a health care professional has other options – non-pharmacological options – to deal with the system of disease and we call that the “PANIC model”: Pain, anxiety, nausea, insomnia, constipation and exhaustion. So they become adept in using the different modalities to address those individual issues. So if there’s a patient in pain, they’ve got some other options whether it’s movement in bed or some breath awareness or use of essential oils. They have other options other than just strictly pharmacological approaches.

Jamie:    I’m excited as a nurse to hear about using some alternative therapies just because as a nurse I know that patients don’t always respond well to traditional medicine and can sometimes really benefit from alternative types of therapies to relax them, to decrease anxiety, to remove focus from pain and reduce their levels of perceived pain. What are you excited about as far as getting some of these nurses involved in this specific type of training?

Gillian:     Well, one of the things we’ve already seen is – the first part of our program is really a self-care component, how to take care of themselves. We all know that things like burnout or compassion fatigue are something that all nurses have, all healthcare professionals, can come across in their careers. The first portion of the program is really about training these nurses to take care of themselves. We’ve seen immediate action. They’re taking action to be better, to be healthier in the way that they approach life and approach their work with the sense of balance and mindfulness.

Take a look at holistic nursing care and the unwavering compassion and commitment by nurses in the field of Hospice and Palliative Care nursing. I got the chance to talk with this month’s featured get-to-know nurse, Pamela Johnson. Pamela is a certified Hospice and Palliative Care nurse and Director of Clinical Services at Odyssey Hospice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I asked her about what drew her to a nursing career focusing on end-of-life care.

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Pamela:    Basically, I have decided, I think, in Junior High School, to volunteer at a community hospital that wasn’t far from my home. I did that once or twice a week. I went all over the hospital. I was in a pharmacy. Then I got to go up in the nursing unit and watch the care that nurses be giving help in little ways but not that much but I really enjoyed watching the interactions between patients and the nurses and thought, “I can do this.” I thought I can go and make a difference. That experience shaped my drive, I guess, to be a nurse. My parents really wanted me to go to college and I was “No. I wanted to go to nursing school. I wanted to go out there and do it as soon as possible.” I did go to nursing school and did that two-and-a-half-year program. I graduated and went right to a Med-Surg unit.

I did that for about six months. Then I went to the Emergency Room. I was really kind of driven to do all that high-tech stuff in the emergency room. I did helicopter service for a little bit. I worked in a trauma unit for some time too. Then I ended up in critical care. I watched the way patients die without their families and with little support and nobody really talked about what exactly what’s going on with that patient or the family. I just didn’t think that was the right way for things to happen. As it turned out, I was a newly-married and my husband had a heart attack. He ended up giving me all the young patients that had MIs, those were young guys, and talking to their wives about how to deal with somebody young that’s having a heart attack. Some of those patients would die. I was just having a hard time with it and decided that I think that it was time for me to go into something different, so I started to do home care. Hospice was first talked about and I got to go along with the nurse who was seeing a hospice patient. I thought, “This is it. This is really what I am supposed to do.”

Jamie:    It’s funny how you fall into it. You were involved in such a broad range of nursing care, really looking for that niche that fits you. You get to that one thing. It’s amazing how it clicks.

Pamela:    It did. It did for me.

Jamie:    What’s one of the things you find most gratifying? I think a lot of people look at hospice care and all they can see is death and dying. But there’s really so much more to hospice care. I think, first of all, that it’s care.

Pamela:    It is care. I think that I didn’t make these bad situations that this patient or this family find themselves in. I didn’t make the cancer or whatever that problem is that that patient and family are experiencing but I can make that situation a little bit better. I can help them figure out what their goals are because it really isn’t about me so much as it’s about them and what they want and talk about quality of life. A lot of times people haven’t been talking about quality of life. When you could help them – and it’s not just me, I don’t want to say that – it’s a team. It’s working with the chaplain. It’s working with the social worker. It’s working with the Home Health Aide that helps with that person’s...

In this month’s episodes, Nursing Notes Live will look into the nursing specialty of the nurse anesthetist. I got the chance to chat with several of these advanced practice nurse specialists in our panel segment this month. Joining me are former American Association of Nurse Anesthetists President Terry Wicks, Nickie Damico, assistant professor and director of professional practice at the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Nurse Anesthesia in Richmond, Virginia, and Timothy Holt Smith, a CRNA at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nursing Notes Live is an audio extension of the national award-winning monthly e-newsletter, Nursing Notes – which offers the latest industry news, trends and updates in nursing. You can subscribe to the e-newsletter at www.discovernursing.com. Each month’s Nursing Notes issue will be accompanied by a couple of episodes of Nursing Notes Live, which will expand on the content and provide you greater insights into the topics presented in the e-newsletter.   You can listen to previous podcasts on the Nursing Notes by Johnson & Johnson Facebook page or NursingNotesLive.com; or visit iTunes to subscribe to the podcast!

With your host Jamie Davis, RN, NREMTP, the Podmedic.

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Transcript of the Discussion:

Jamie: Terry, this is the oldest nursing specialty. How did nurse anesthetist become a specialty when there weren’t other nursing specialties per se at the time?

Terry: Early in the 20th century, most of the anesthesia was administered by interns and junior surgery residents who really were more interested in becoming surgeons. They were in the operating room simultaneously watching the surgery and administering the anesthesia. Not surprisingly, knowing what we do about anesthesia agents at the time, a lot of patients didn’t do so well. So some enterprising surgeons decided to have dedicated nursing staff, learned to administer anesthesia, particularly at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis. That really was the birth of the profession as a specialty for nurses. For a long, long, long time, nurse anesthetists were the only healthcare specialty, if you will, that administered an anesthesia and then anesthesiologists sort of came along after that, years after that, and our two professions grew along parallel paths. As recently as the middle of 1970’s there were probably equal numbers of nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists in the country. The numbers are not significantly different today but there are a few more anesthesiologists than CRNAs.

Jamie: That’s amazing to hear that story. Really, nurses set the standard of care for the specialty and were there doing it actively as specialists before doctors were. I wasn’t aware of that. That’s pretty fascinating.

Terry: You’re not going to have doctors tell you that.

Jamie: Well, of course, we won’t. But we all know what really goes on, right?

Terry: Yes.

Jamie: Tim, were you going to say something?

Timothy: I was going to say, Terry was talking about the Mayo Clinic. Alice Magaw who was sort of – she was a nurse and she was friends with, I think, Charles Mayo’s wife who was also a nurse. She really started the ball rolling. She saw that the mortality was pretty high at that time. She started talking to patients. Since she was doing it on a consistent basis, she learned to really taper down from the amount of anesthetic that was ...

Look into the nursing specialty of the nurse anesthetist. I got the chance to talk with this month’s Featured “Get to Know Nurse” Don Wood. Don’s a certified registered nurse anesthetist at South Broward Endoscopy Center in Cooper City, Florida. I asked him about his start in the nursing profession and what drew him to oldest of nursing specialties.

Nursing Notes Live is an audio extension of the national award-winning monthly e-newsletter, Nursing Notes – which offers the latest industry news, trends and updates in nursing. You can subscribe to the e-newsletter at www.discovernursing.com.

Each month’s Nursing Notes issue will be accompanied by a couple of episodes of Nursing Notes Live, which will expand on the content and provide you greater insights into the topics presented in the e-newsletter.  You can listen to previous podcasts on  the Nursing Notes by Johnson & Johnson Facebook page or NursingNotesLive.com; or visit iTunes to subscribe to the podcast!

Hosted by Jamie Davis, RN, NREMTP, the Podmedic.

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Transcript of the Interview:

Jamie: Don, it’s great to have you here on Nursing Notes Live, why don’t you fill us in a little bit about your nursing background. What drew you to become a nurse?

Don: Well, my initial entry into nursing was based on some of the stuff I did when I was in high school as a volunteer fireman. At that point in time, up in Jacksonville, Florida, the fire rescue division had just become the fire rescue division, branching out from just fire suppression into having an ambulance service. As a volunteer fireman, when they expanded out into the county, I would have [enrolled] throughout the rescue units to go ahead and sort of get them directions. There was this new area and the west side of Duval County didn’t help out. Going to some of the classes they went to you could see how things were advancing. At that point in time, advanced first aid was the big thing. There were no EMTs who were out there or paramedics or anything like that. But seeing the advanced medical procedures that were taking place – airway management, IVs, that type of stuff – in my mind I was seeing the nurses would be a great addition to that type of unit they would have out there. So when I got out high school, I applied, and was accepted into the nursing program at Florida Junior College and entered that in 1971 in August. I graduated 1973 and continue to work in the emergency room and also in the intensive care unit. There were some hospitals in the Jacksonville area.

Jamie: You really got started in your healthcare career back in the days of Johnny and Roy from emergency – for those who are old enough to remember that.

Don: Very much so. That was back when they had the – it was called the LifePak/33. The “33” is because that was the designed weight for that particular portable defibrillator which is a very, very early model, they missed – it actually weighed 34 pounds. That was quite hard carrying around. But again it’s been interesting to see the development within emergency medicine, how that has gone along so far over the years. We have made a very, very big impact on healthcare these days.

Jamie: What drew you then to become a nurse anesthetist? Was it the advanced airway management? Or was it just – it is the oldest of nursing specialties so certainly it was around when you were getting started.

Don: Well,

Nursing Notes newsletter delivers a look at the Perinatal Nursing specialty. I brought together a panel of perinatal nurses to discuss this nursing specialty and some of the exciting changes on the horizon for patient care and nurses in this field. On the panel were current AWHONN board member and Labor and Delivery Nurse Manager Kelly Walker, Anne Robinson, public health nurse for Eagle County, Colorado and previously a labor and delivery nurse and patient care quality manager, and Cyndy Krening, a perinatal nurse specialist at Littleton Adventist Hospital in Littleton, Colorado and our featured Get To Know Nurse this month.

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Transcript of Discussion:

Jamie:                  I want to start off the discussion with Kelly Walker. Kelly, you were awarded as one of the Emerging Leaders Grantees and participated in this unique mentoring program that AWHONN has supported – the Association of Women’s Health Obstetrical and Neonatal Nurses – and I wonder if you would share with us some of the things that you gained from being part of this groundbreaking program.

Kelly:                   Part of the leadership program, which I encourage everyone to apply for, it took my perspective of my little work area in OB and just giving it a more global perspective – how things work altogether hand in hand from prenatal care to antepartum care to labor and delivery to the newborn stage. It’s just all those little aspects to affect the whole big picture. I think working through the Emerging Leader program, you met other mentors throughout AWHONN and other nurses like yourself working in the trenches trying to figure out what can we do to improve our patient outcomes.

Jamie:                  I think that mentoring is such a vital part of the nursing process as nurses share and pass on their knowledge and collaborate and creating new ways to improve patient outcome. It’s really exciting to hear about this program. Cyndy, we talked in our other episode this month about your specific path through the nursing career as our Get-to-Know Nurse but I wonder if you would share some of your thoughts about being a member of this organization for perinatal nurses. AWHONN has so many programs and projects like this Emerging Leaders program that improve patient outcomes, what do you look forward to on the future in this organization?

Cyndy:                  Well, I do think that AWHONN, for many years, has strived to enhance perinatal nursing as a profession from many fronts. There’s quality education coming out of the organization. The Emerging Leaders program like Kelly just mentioned. There’s written resources that are educational material as well as educational offerings and our national convention and just resources within the organization at many levels. Nursing is an amazing profession because there are so many ways to diversify yourself and specialize as a nurse. I think our specialty is no different than others.

Jamie:                  Anne, go ahead.

Anne:                   Yes. Cyndy, I agree. I was an OB nurse and went to neonatal nurse for eight years and moved in to quality patient safety and then I’ve been working in the last four years within public health. More on the prenatal end of things of the maternal child health and what can we do to get those women to access care, to prevent problems and complications later on. It’s amazing to see how that organization helps with educating in those opportunities but then once you’re involved in that organization, how then your experience can change and evolve as your career evolves.

Nursing Notes newsletter delivers a look at the Perinatal Nursing specialty. I got the chance to talk with this month’s Featured “Get to Know Nurse” Cyndy Krening. Cyndy’s a perinatal nurse specialist at Littleton Adventist Hospital in Littleton, Colorado and I asked her about how she got started as both a nurse and her interest in perinatal nursing.

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Jamie:                  Hi, Cyndy! Welcome to Nursing Notes Live.

Cyndy:          Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jamie:                  We’re going to talk a little bit about Perinatal Nursing this month. One of the questions I would have – and perhaps people don’t understand – perinatal nursing, is that just another word for “labor and delivery nursing” or is it more than that?

Cyndy:          It encompasses labor and delivery nursing but the word “perinatal” really is a broader term that means the time surrounding childbirth. It really encompasses the antepartum period, the antenatal period during pregnancy through labor, delivery and recovery and then the early post-partum period. It’s a broader term.

Jamie:                  First of all, how did you decide to become a nurse? Everybody has a story to tell. What drew you to the nursing career?

Cyndy:          I’ve been asked that a lot and I don’t have a very glamorous story for that. It was one of the situations where my high school counselor said, “What do you want to do?” I think, for years, I had said as growing up as a kid that I wanted to be a nurse. Yet, as I’ve looked back on that, I don’t recall having any specific thoughts of why I wanted to be a nurse. I feel like I had just always said that. Yet, as my journey unfolded, as I headed off to my bachelor’s program and now had a career in nursing, I do feel that that is absolutely was my calling and somehow subconsciously I must have known that from the start. I just had the sense that that’s what I should do and started on that journey and have felt that it was right from the start.

Jamie:                  Now, perinatal nursing, is that something you were involved with right out of school or is that something you found along the way after starting off maybe in Med-Surg or some other more traditional area?

Cyndy:          In nursing school, I got a little worried as we started doing clinicals because there were some clinical areas that I didn’t love being in. I thought, “Oh, gosh. What area of nursing is going to interest me?” Just as I began to worry, I had the opportunity to be in a couple of more acute care clinical areas like ER and then labor and delivery. Labor and delivery is one of those things that people either, I think, love or hate. I made that decision in nursing school that that was an area that I would really enjoy working in. Years ago, they didn’t hire new grads ever into labor and delivery. I ended up working my first couple of years actually on a neurology unit, which wasn’t my favorite at all, while I waited for the opportunity to get a job in labor and delivery. I’ve been a nurse for 31 years and 29 of it I’ve been on the OB arena.

Jamie:                  With the expansion of perinatal outside of the traditional labor and delivery realm, you really are dealing with the health of a family not just a mother and a new baby. Really there are so many aspects of a family’s connection with the mother and the new baby or babies – because we have lots of multiple births going on. What is your feeling about how you reach out to families as part of your job as a nurse?

Cyndy:          Well,

Delve in to the world of the clinical nurse specialist. In this episode we brought together a panel of clinical nurse specialists from around the country to talk about this advanced practice nursing path. Joining us today are Martha Gurzick, Clinical Nurse Specialist in Pediatrics at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland, Ann Mayo, Professor at the University of San Diego Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science, and Peggy Wellman a Nurse Manager at CDH Proton Center in Illinois.

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Interviews with Martha Gurzick, Ann Mayo and Peggy Wellmann

Jamie Davis: I’m excited to have the two of you here to talk about clinical nurse specialists and advanced practice nursing in general and I know a little bit of our discussion earlier. Ann, you brought up that clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners are seen as peers as advanced practice nurses. Would you like to talk a little bit about what the similarities or differences are between what you will consider a nurse practitioner and a clinical nurse specialist?

Ann Mayo: Well, sure. I’d also like to add to that list that certified registered nurse anesthetists as well as nurse midwives are also advanced practice nurses. In the United States we have actually four categories of advanced practice nurses. States will regulate the practice of advanced practice nurses. In some states advanced practice nurses obtain licenses to practice. In other states, they’re certified. There are a few states that don’t regulate the practice of some of their advanced practice nurses and that does apply to some CNS in a few states across the United States. But in terms of practice, generally, across the US there are actually four categories. I think the CNS and NP are probably paired together most frequently because we – in both groups have the opportunity to provide care and give access to care to diverse population of patients anywhere from newborns all the way up to geriatric – very frail, elderly older persons. Because of that, I think the CNS and NP can sometimes be confused with each other. The NP provides direct patient care. To contrast that to the CNS, the CNS not only provides direct patient care but they also consult with other nurses who might need their expertise and they work in systems whether it’s clinical systems or hospital systems on very large evidence-based practice projects to roll those out, to improve the quality of care. As a result the NP, because they see patients and provide direct patient care, can see a broader spectrum of patients. So, for example, they could be in a primary care clinic. They could see newborns all the way to older adults all the daylong in their practice. For instance, the clinical nurse specialist, the key word here is “specialist.” Because the clinical nurse specialist has these other spheres both patient, nursing, and systems sphere that they operate in – they have a more narrow specialty. You may find CNS who specialized in geriatric nursing, who specialize in cardiovascular nursing, who specialize in pulmonary nursing. Like Martha, Martha specializes in pediatric nursing.

Jamie: Martha, how does being a clinical nurse specialist in your facility help you provide a unique type of care for your patients?

Martha Gurzick: I’m in a great position to really bring the evidence to the bedside and assist the nurses in really providing great quality care so that we have good patient outcomes. That’s essentially my goal. I’m in a unique situation where there’s pretty much a clinical nurse specialists on each of our units.

This month’s Nursing Notes newsletter delves into the world of the clinical nurse specialist. Recently, we got the chance to talk with Featured “Get to Know Nurse” Susan Bruce, a clinical nurse specialist in oncology at Duke Raleigh Cancer Center in North Carolina. I asked Susan about her career as a nurse and what inspired her to continue to advance her practice level as a Clinical Nurse Specialist.

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Jamie Davis:           Susan, welcome to Nursing Notes Live.

Susan Bruce:         Thank you, Jamie. I’m happy to be here.

Jamie:                  Susan, one of the things I like to always ask is what led you to become a nurse and enter this career, this calling which I think any of us nurses really believe it is a calling, to be part of this healing team that brings people such comfort and nurses certainly are very good at doing that. Tell us a little bit about how you became a nurse, how you made that decision.

Susan:                  Yes. Once upon a time – now, seriously though, my grandmother was nurse. I think I never had any questions about what I wanted to be. I don’t recall ever wanting to be anything else but a nurse. I think I was very much taken in with some of her stories about what it was to be a nurse. Back in those days, because I’ve been a nurse now for 33 years, so back in those days they prepared the meals, they scrubbed the floors, they did the nursing care and all of that. There was just like something very touching about the way she would tell stories about being a nurse. Her background was mother-baby. She worked nights and spent a lot of times with the new mothers after they had delivered babies so I think a lot of teaching occurred. Then I thought, “That really sounds like what I wanted to do.” I get to meet people at a happy time in their life – or she did anyway – I would have that opportunity as well. I think that’s what initially got me drawn into nursing. Also of note, her sister was a nurse. I don’t know that much background, what kind of nursing she did, but just the thought that a couple of members in my family were nurses, I think, just kind of guided me in that direction. How I got to where I am today in oncology: I started out in a Children’s Hospital after I graduated from school and worked on a teenage Psych unit and Medicine unit. I think I took care of my very first oncology patient there. She was a 16-year-old leukemia patient. I just really got involved with her care and the fact that she was in and out and the ability to get to know her better. I really liked that more than just hands-on a patient that maybe came in to surgery, have their surgery, and went home. You really didn’t get to know the people that well. After that, I did a brief period of medical-surgical nursing and have the opportunity to relocate to Boston and decided to pursue my career in oncology nursing. I’ve been doing that now for 30 years and can’t think of anything else that I would rather do. There is something about being able to reach out and touch the lives of people and their families when they are at a very vulnerable time in their life and certainly people diagnosed with cancer they are in a very vulnerable state of time. Just getting to know them being there and being their guide through this journey is how I like to think of it. I have worked very many years at the bedside. In fact, for the majority of my career, I’ve been at the bedside. Within the last 15 months or so, I have taken on a clinical nurse specialist role which is certainly a little bit different than being at the bedside.