"Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity": ER Nurse & Author on Surviving Your Nursing Career
Podcast Episode
Bio from Jenn: Hi, I’m Jennifer Johnson, and I am a wife, mother of two, and a Registered Nurse in Ontario, Canada. I have spent the last sixteen years of my career in the emergency room of big and small hospitals all over Northern and Southern Ontario. I have personally been a part of all the heartbreak, drama, bullying, life-threatening moments, and also trying to cope in the ER during an ongoing pandemic. My debut book Nursing Intuition: How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity and Survive Your Career is finally here and it's my rally cry to all the other nurses struggling through this pandemic and finding that they are losing their love of nursing.
Imagine Being the Only Nurse Working in the ER
During our conversation on the Club Nurse Podcast, Jenn reflects on her experience being the only nurse working in the ER in a small, remote hospital in Canada. While the volume is lower than a busy trauma center in the city, being alone to manage emergencies coming in the door comes with a set of challenges. Jenn talks about having to call up to the floor or the CNO for extra hands when assistance was required. Other than a couple small periods of time stepping away from the emergency department, Jenn has spent the majority of her 17 years as a nurse in the ED.
“I was a mess. I shouldn’t have been nursing. I was just a complete zombie.”
Jenn reflects on a group of attorneys in Ontario, during the 2020 global pandemic, offering healthcare workers to complete their wills, free of charge. This act of service hit Jenn square in the face, forcing her to realize the level of seriousness that the pandemic was bringing to our livelihoods.
This action led Jenn to writing in a journal, stories for her children to read, thinking that this would be something positive for them to hold onto. She explains how the 2-3 positive stories turned into “everything else out and all the trauma and all the things that I'd never dealt with, so cathartic.” A true testament to the therapeutic nature of getting our trauma out of our bodies and onto paper or into the air in your therapist’s office. This spilling of her trauma onto paper turned into Jenn’s first official book that she published, Nursing Intuition: How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity, and Survive Your Career. In this book, Jenn recounts many stories that will leave chills down your spine and help you to find and trust your own nursing intuition.
Do We All Have Intuition?
Jenn believes that we all have intuition as human beings. The part that many of us lose, miss, or ignore: trusting it. Colton and Jenn discuss how they both feel intuition and where they find that feeling in their own bodies. Jenn vulnerably recounts personal stories from her nursing career and how certain moments in her career became turning points to always trusting her own intuition. One story in particular that stuck out was when she writes (and talks) about a moment when she knew something was wrong and she spoke up, continuously nudging the provider to dig deeper. This case ultimately led to a patient's death. Is there one person to blame? No. Could the outcome have been different if Jenn’s urgency was taken seriously? Maybe.
The important lesson is that nurses are on the front lines. The world learned this during the pandemic, and it is our duty to speak up. Even if you are wrong 9 times out of 10, that one life that you may save by speaking up from a gut feeling is vital to patient outcomes. Jenn states that when providers take the time to lay eyes on a patient even one more time, it can drastically increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
Biggest Takeway
Learn where you feel your intuition and where that “gut feeling” goes for you. Trust that feeling. And read Jenn’s book for prompts, tips, tools, and personal stories that you can connect to—and be sure to find Jenn on LinkedIn and Instagram to follow her journey and join the conversation.
Catch the full episode and conversation with Jennifer Johnson on Club Nurse.
