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Hometown

Norfolk, VA

Joie de VIVre

Being a nurse, writer, motivational speaker and health-care consultant.

VIV Moment

When I held my book, Save the First Dance for You: The Complete Nurse’s Guide to Serving Your Profession, Your Patients & Yourself, in my hands for the first time, I knew all was well and as it should be.

Having spent the last 30 years of my life as a nurse helping people, I have seen how job-related stress often interferes with our ability to be in transpersonal caring relationships. The stress can bow even the strongest, and crack some under its pressure.

Nurses (and others in the caring sciences) have stresses like everyone else in the world — plus the potential stress of serious injury to their personhood and their patient, from even the slightest inaccuracy.

Nurses work with staffing shortages, requiring them to do more with less. They work rotating shifts and double shifts, and return to work after 8 hours of rest to meet the needs of their patients, as well as their organizations. They’re exposed to deadly diseases, accidental needle-sticks and body fluid splashes.

When I wrote my self-help book for members of my profession, I knew I was doing what I was called to do and loved doing. I also realized, in that moment, that all my experiences in life brought me to this place. Suddenly, I saw there could be peace in my world, inside and out.

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