Her Story
About Bobbie
I've been in nursing for 25 years, and my journey started in an unexpected way. Growing up with a mom who was a nurse, I always said I didn't want to be a nurse. After graduating high school, I took a year off and didn't pursue college, but then I started realizing nursing was a field where I could make decent money and have opportunities for different types of jobs anywhere I moved. I started with an 11-month LPN program, thinking I'd just do one year and quit, but every couple years I went back through correspondence and online programs, first getting my RN associate degree and then later my bachelor's degree. I've worked in many different areas over the years, with my main area of expertise being medical surgical nursing, though my favorite was behavioral health. Before I stepped away from full-time work, I was in a remote care management position, working from home and going through lists of patients who had been hospitalized over the weekend from the clinics I worked for, making sure I followed up with them and they got everything they needed - their medications, their follow-up appointments - and I gave lots of teaching on chronic health conditions like heart failure and diabetes. In April 2024, I made the difficult decision to quit my full-time job to stay home and care for my husband, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had gone through a liver transplant that was supposed to cure it but the cancer came back. The VA offered a program where I could be approved as his at-home caregiver, and he passed away in January of this year. I'm now ready to get back into the job market and live my life again.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Bobbie
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say the want for better compensation always drove me to continue my education. I started with just my LPN, which is the very base-level nursing you can do, and there are some restrictions on things you can do, especially in the hospital when you're just an LPN. But that desire for better compensation kept pushing me forward to get my RN associate degree and then my bachelor's degree. I also think my most notable professional achievement is overcoming a problem I had with prescription substance abuse that led to me being disciplined by a hospital I worked at and also the Board of Nursing. They put me on professional license probation for 5 years with a lot of stipulations and things I had to do, and I really think that doing that and coming through that is definitely my proudest achievement - being able to overcome that, stay a nurse, and get through it. It's one of the reasons why I like behavioral health so much, because I could identify from problems I had experienced in my own life with the patients.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
While it's nice to have friends at work, you need to be very careful about how you handle work relationships, and basically keep your really personal business to yourself and don't share that with people at work like they're your family, because they are not. That's probably not a happy rainbows piece of advice people would like, but I can think of many times that I thought I had really close friends and told people I worked with things that I shouldn't have, and then regretted it later. I think that holding up your professionalism and your emotional state are very important. This would probably go for any job in general.
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