Jennifer Nouse

I really love learning! In fact, after I got my doctorate, I was like, now what? Now what degree can I get? Because I just enjoy it. I love the medical field. I love learning more, and I love to see good outcomes. Good outcomes doesn't always mean you get the outcome that you want, but it means that maybe it's not that we saved your mother, but we helped your mother pass away with dignity and respect. I was able to hold her hand through it. That's one thing that I remember very strongly from COVID - I didn't always have the skills that I used to have anymore because things changed so quickly. So sometimes it was just a matter of sitting there holding someone's hand as they're gasping for air, and just comforting them. Those are things that are so important, is just being there for someone. We're not always able to help them the way we want to, but sometimes just those little things make all the difference.

The best advice I've received, and something I told myself throughout COVID, is don't try to boil the ocean. Instead of panicking when things were constantly changing and I had no idea what to do, I would go behind a closed door, take a deep breath, and say, okay, what are we going to do? How am I going to tackle this? What is my first step? And then, what am I going to learn from it? That's how I would keep myself from going into anxiety overload. For somebody who's an overthinker and felt like everybody's lives were in my hands, that was how I calmed myself down. You have to compartmentalize it sometimes and say, here's the problem, here's the first step. We're just going to take it one step at a time, instead of trying to boil the ocean. You don't have to boil the ocean right now. You have to stop and fix one problem at a time, and then it just leads to you finally figuring out the whole situation, but you just have to start somewhere.

Nursing is a career that is lifelong and ever-changing. I tell every student that I have ever dealt with to keep their minds open and find the work that they love. You're not locked into one sector of nursing. Your world is wide open - opportunities abound. Find what you love, and learn as much as you can about it, and then just pursue it. And it's okay to change your mind at some point, because you can pivot easily in this career, in this profession. You're not locked into one area, and there are so many different ways of helping people regardless of what position you're in.

A lot of the restrictions with reimbursement - that sounds financial, but it's not. It definitely limits the amount of work we can do in terms of what we feel is best for patients and patient care. There are so many restrictions on how you treat a patient, and it's frustrating that it's coming from non-clinical sources. Our hands are tied. There are ways that we feel, we know from 32 years of being a nurse, how I would prefer to treat my patients, but we're restricted by certain regulations and reimbursement limitations. If it's not financially supported, you really cannot perform it. We're very limited in resources and access. Patients don't have the type of access to medical care that they deserve, whether that's financial, insurance, transportation, or availability in their regions. I live in a rural community, and our access to medical care is very limited and sometimes dangerous. It's extremely frustrating.

Never give up. And always put that patient first, or whoever you're dealing with - if it's a patient, a client, a student. You have to get into their mindset, because people are coming at you with so many things. If that patient's screaming at you, or that family member is screaming at you, or something is happening, you have to understand where they're coming from and not internalize it so much as to really empathize. Who I am as a person is who I am as a professional. It's not all about me. You take the emotion out of it sometimes, and you just have to remember that things are happening for a reason, because someone else is having a bad day, or they've got a struggle that they're trying to face and work around. Ethics, dependability, and trust are huge for me. You've gotta be able to depend on each other.