"I have been a nurse for 14 years, but my interest in the profession goes back long before I took my first college course. Growing up outside a small town in rural Texas, I learned early on how important it is for people to take care of each other. I decided as a young girl that I would become a nurse, both to help people when they needed it most and to give them the kind of personal, responsive attention that reflects the best of my small-town roots.
After working as an RN in a variety of settings, ranging from a children’s camp in the Colorado mountains to the chaos of a trauma center ER, I made the most transformative decision of my life by volunteering to serve as a medical missionary in Honduras. I was thousands of miles from home, but in many ways, it felt like a homecoming. My first job involved setting up a new hospital in a small mountain village: the landscape and language were different, but the need for quality healthcare was the same as back home, and our patients often traveled even farther to receive critical healthcare services.
While helping run the new hospital, I also worked in the traveling medical brigade that brought basic hospital services to the region’s remotest villages. Somewhere between carrying medications in my backpack, leading donkeys laden with medical supplies, and delivering care to patients who had gone far too long without formal medical services, I decided to pursue the training that would allow me to deliver even more comprehensive care to my patients, wherever they might be. That meant studying to become a nurse practitioner.
Five years after I first set foot in Honduras, I returned to the US to study for my nurse practitioner certification. I earned my Masters of Science in Nursing degree in 2018, then spent the next year providing outpatient care at an internal medicine practice in Shreveport, LA."
