More About Me
I was three years into my OR career when my preceptor set me up in front of the Chief of Vascular Surgery during an open AAA. I couldn’t find a piece of equipment. She’d sent it out for repair two days earlier and said nothing. When the surgeon looked up, she patted his hand and said: “Don’t worry. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
I found out later what she’d done. I spent the next several decades figuring out why people do that, and what it actually takes to heal from it.
That’s why you’re here.
Family
I have burned down the kitchen three times. The door also fell off the refrigerator. Bob still loves me. That tells you everything you need to know about the man- and about us.
I am a grandmother. Kennedy gets popcorn for breakfast when she’s with me. Her mother has learned to shrug. I consider this a parenting win.
I need my sisters. The biological ones and the chosen ones. The women who know the whole story and show up anyway. I don’t function well without that circle and I don’t pretend to.
School
I wanted to be a teacher. My sister had already claimed that spot. So I became a nurse instead.
Best accident of my life.
I started with a diploma in nursing. Then a BSN. Then, when I was Director of Surgery in the 1980s- when women were just beginning to show up in leadership- I wanted to sit at the big boy table. So I got an MBA.
The doctorate is more personal than that.
I went through a divorce where my ex-husband had convinced me I was ugly, stupid, fat, only had one boob, and unlovable. That nobody would ever want me.
I showed him.
And somewhere in the middle of all that research and writing and defending- I found myself again.
That’s the real reason I have a Doctorate of Management in Organizational Leadership.
Not just the bullying. Not just the career. Me.
Work
Between my first and second years of nursing school, I worked midnights as a patient care tech. The hospital wasn’t air conditioned. I was assigned a six-man ward on the 11th floor in the middle of summer. Somehow I got pulled to the ED one night. I was in heaven- it was air conditioned. The work was pretty great too.
I stayed in the ED after graduation. Loved every minute of it — until the day I told an unruly patient to get his blankety-blank butt on the blankety-blank stretcher. I realized I needed a change. This was before HCAHPS. Nobody was measuring my bedside manner. But I knew.
So I went to the OR. My second love.
For the next thirty years I went back and forth- ED to OR, OR to ED- because I couldn’t choose and I didn’t have to. I became an Assistant Nurse Manager in the OR. Then Charge Nurse. Then House Supervisor- my absolute favorite role of all of them. Then Service Line Coordinator. Manager of GI Labs. Then Director of Surgical Services- a position I held several times over the course of my career.
House Supervisor was my absolute favorite. I got to be the go-to person for the staff nurses. The firefighter. The one who could pull a nurse out of thin air when the unit was drowning. The hugger when things went completely off the rails.
When I started chemo for breast cancer, my hair was falling out. I was working midnights as a House Supervisor. The ICU nurses lathered up my head and shaved it for me.
That is nursing. That is why I never left.
In 2006 I joined the Advisory Board Company as a Director of Talent Development in the Nursing Leadership Academy. Over the next nine years I walked into more than 300 hospitals and healthcare organizations and helped nurses become leaders. It remains some of the most important work I’ve ever done.
After I married Bob, I came back to the bedside- as Director of the ED and OR at MyMichigan in Alma. My loves. One more time.
I have also been an adjunct professor at A.T. Still University for fourteen years. And my journey into coaching began in 2000. I have never stopped learning how to do it better.
That is fifty years of nursing. I have been the new grad, the charge nurse, the director, the consultant, the professor, and the coach. I know this world from every angle.
Life Philosophy
When all else fails, drop back 10 yards and punt.
I have lived by that long enough to know it is not about giving up. It is about knowing when to reset. When to stop forcing something that isn’t working and find a different angle. Nursing taught me that. So did divorce. So did cancer. So did bullying. You don’t always get to run the play you called. You get to decide what you do next.
The rest of my philosophy fits on a bumper sticker.
Faith.
I love Jesus. I also swear a lot. He and I have made our peace with that. My faith is not a performance. It is the thing that holds when everything else lets go.
Family.
Bob. Kennedy and the popcorn. My sisters- biological and chosen. The ones who know the whole story and show up anyway. I don’t function well without my people and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.
Friends.
They own a piece of my heart. I may not see them as often as I’d like. The connection is there anyway. Real friendship doesn’t require maintenance. It just requires showing up when it matters.
Fun.
I have burned down the kitchen three times. The door fell off the refrigerator. I give my granddaughter popcorn for breakfast. Life is too short and too hard to be serious about all of it.
Fierce.
I sat at tables where women weren’t expected to speak. I went back to school in the middle of a career most people would have called finished. I did the research nobody else wanted to do. I wrote the book. I built the tools. Fierce isn’t loud. It’s just unstoppable.
