Announcing...

Attention! Exciting announcement! I am announcing an exciting addition to help people on their journey to heal! I have officially expanded to have a primary care practice. I am able to fully function as a primary care provider (ordering labs, making referrals, doing well physicals) with the exception of prescribing or managing medications. But with diet and lifestyle changes, many medications may not be necessary. I would also like to share with you here, what I wrote about why I am who I am, and why I am doing what I am doing.

I am able to provide nursing care and support in a way I have desired and imagined since I first read biographies about Clara Barton (founded the Red Cross) and Florence Nightingale (“founder of modern nursing”) before I was ten! I loved the model of community health care, visiting nurses taking care of the sick and well, going from home to home doing baby weights, comforting the dying, and providing education. When I took community health in nursing school, I was disappointed at the changes that have occurred over the last hundred year. Developing countries have institutionalized the care of health–which we now call our health care system. Don’t get me wrong–we have had many great advances in medicine–surgery, procedures, life support–all these have lowered the death rate from accidents and other problems, and they are great!

But I had fallen in love with a different model of nursing, and although I loved my nursing job for many years, what I loved most about it was it looked like our history–when I felt that I was emulating my nursing “mothers.” I loved the idea of being able to be in a family’s world. To be with them through their most exciting and most difficult life events. Birth and death. Joy and sadness. To be there when the light bulb goes on, and they accept into their minds some new and previously foreign concept about sanitation, health, diet, immune support, whatever it may be. To provide the education that brought them to that point. To be accepted as part of their family–to be trusted with that humbling responsibility.

And this is what I love!

And this is why I am so excited to be where I am today. The pieces came together quickly in the end. I am still at times surprised and just trying to catch my breath. But when I look back at the last 10 years of my life, I see the pieces God put together in a wonderful design–and I feel so blessed! There are times when I am so tired (mostly from doing the business side of this), and then I receive a phone call from a mom, or individual who is seeking someone to listen to them, so afraid yet another person will tell them they are making it up. After listening, grieving with them about the hard journey they have been on, and then sharing some hope that was recently shared with me, my exhaustion melts away. I often hang up the phone, smiling, and exclaim out loud (usually to an empty room) “I love my job! I love what I do!” Because this is when I am refreshed and renewed. This is what I was made for!

I believe God has many plans for me, and many things for me to do throughout my life–both hard and easy. But I am so grateful that I am able to use this part of how I am made in such a big way! And that I get to take part in bringing a blessing to the lives of others.

Onward!