Nurse Blogger, Sallie Jessee

[00:00] Michelle: I jumped at the opportunity to talk to my guest this week, Sallie Jessee. Sally is an incredible person with a unique perspective.
First, she has a niche job. She is a mobile wound care clinic nurse and I loved hearing all about that. She is also a blogger. When she became a wife and mother, she identified a gap in resources for nurses balancing family and career and then took the initiative to create a supportive community through her blog, Bandaids and Bedtime Stories. This is ingenuity at its best. Her ability to blend her professional insights with personal experiences makes her writing relatable, valuable, and inspiring. The topics she covers, from relationship dynamics to parenting challenges, as well as self-care for nurses, are so important, especially in a demanding field. And she brings light to some of the nursing profession's darkest moments, like toxic bullying. There's even something for those new to the profession, how to choose the right nursing specialty. 
Though Sally is just getting started, her journey will resonate with nurses and parents alike, and I can't wait to see what she does next. 
In the five-minute snippet: babysitters, listen up.  Well, good morning, Sally. Welcome to the podcast.

[01:50] Sallie: Hi, thank you for having me.

[01:53] Michelle: Well, you're welcome. I met you on Instagram. I came across your profile, which is really cool, and I have included that in the link and that's @BandAidsandbedtimestories. And it immediately caught my eye. I was like, oh, that's really clever. So I need to know more about Sallie. So thank you so much for joining me today, and we're going to talk about a few things. One of the things I'm really interested in is your work as a wound care nurse because that's a very niche job, I feel. And you are not just a wound care nurse, you are a mobile wound care nurse. And so I really want to hear more about that. And then you do have the amazing blog, Bandaids and Bedtime Stories, and I want to hear about that too, because I was reading that and you have some really, really good content on there.

[02:56] Sallie: Thank you.

[02:57] Michelle: So, yeah, so we're just going to start by who is Sallie Jessee, what's your story?

[03:04] Sallie: So, my name is Sallie. I have been a nurse and I've actually worked in healthcare for over ten years now. Been a nurse for the last several years. I started out working in long-term care and skilled nursing, and I hated it. I really wanted to be a nurse. And I started as a nurse to help people, and I just felt like I was passing pills all day long. And so we actually had an opportunity at my skilled nursing facility that I worked at to become a wound nurse. And at first, I was like, I don't really know if that's for me. But then I started training in it, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I love that I could visually see what I was working on. You give someone, you know, a cardiac med or any kind of blood pressure medication, you can see it through taking their BP and all of that. But with a wound, I can see what I'm doing. I'm putting that Meda Honey on that, whatever kind of treatments ordered by the provider, and I could physically see every day the changes that that wound is making. And I also never understood how much the wounds actually affected patients. I never thought about it before becoming a nurse or even working as a wound nurse that these patients don't want to leave their homes. They, you know, the wounds have drainage. They smell. They could be painful and uncomfortable for them. They have, you know, large wraps sometimes depending on the size of the wounds. And it just really affects their everyday life once they are discharged from a facility. So I started doing that, and like I said, I fell in love with it. I had a really wonderful nurse practitioner. Her name was Brittany, that I worked with. That taught me everything I know, and I owe my career where I'm now to her. After I left the skilled medicine facility, I went to an LTAC, and I worked on that floor in the LTAC and also became their wound care nurse as well. Loved it because I was seeing large wounds. These people were really, really sick, and these wounds were taking a long time to heal. We were able to get the testing done they needed, to provide the daily treatments that they needed, um, and just go from there, help them get better so that they could go back home to have the life that they wanted. May not be the life that they thought that they were going to have or that they had before, but at least give them the ability to have some kind of life at home. And then I was there for about a year and a half. I left there because I had an opportunity to spend more time with my daughters. I have two little girls, and they're actually the ones that inspired my blog. My oldest is four, my youngest is two. And when I started working at the LTAC, my baby was, like, six months old at the time. And so I needed more time with her because you only have so much time with them when they're little. So I had this opportunity to come and work for the mobile wound clinic. I absolutely love my job. The company I work for now is called United Wound Care Institute. We're in about 16 different states. I live in Arizona and we're doing really well here in Arizona. I go into the patient's homes and I'm able to help them in their home, work in conjunction with home health and all that. So I've met a ton of great nurses, great directors of nursing, all sorts of nursing staff from CNA'S that can help these patients out with their wounds as well.

[06:10] Michelle: Wow, that's fantastic. That's quite a journey. And agree with you so much. I talked a few weeks ago with a wound nurse, Karen Zulkowski, her episode hasn't come out yet. But that is such an interesting specialty and it's so nuanced. And like you, I really didn't give it a lot of thought being a pediatric nurse. We saw wounds, but, you know, kids usually heal really quickly. And then again in the NICU, our specific wounds were more like extravasations, wounds from like the high flow nasal cannula or the ET tube, things like that that were really fairly easy to prevent and to treat. Again, I'm fascinated by it. I think it's such an interesting specialty and there's so much emerging evidence on things like the Manuka honey, and different treatments. So that's great. You work in a mobile wound clinic and as you mentioned, you go into patients homes. So is it, it's similar to home health, correct?

[07:24] Sallie: Yeah. What we do is the great thing for us regarding our company is home healths have to wait for the primary care physicians to give them orders. It can take forever for them to get those orders. The great thing with them working with my company is that they are actually able to call us right away. I actually had a nurse that called me last night at 7:30 at night, sent me a picture of what was going on with the wound. We're able to get a provider out to go see them right away. We, if we get a referral from a company from a skilled nursing hospital, anything like that, we're seeing patients within 24 to 48 hours. They're not having to wait to get into that wound clinic. Sometimes clinics, like brick-and-mortar wound clinics can take weeks, or months to get into, whereas with us we're able to get to see them right away. And then you have patients that are bed-bound bound that can't leave their homes. How are they going to have their wounds taken care of. And a lot of these home health nurses are wonderful. But maybe wounds aren't their specialty. Maybe they don't feel super comfortable with taking care of wounds or they just don't have the education and knowledge about it. So with us, our providers, our nurses were wound care certified. I myself am wound care certified. So we are able to help provide that oversight of that wound like a primary care would. Our medical director is able to give orders, provide antibiotics, all of that. And these patients are getting cared and seen much faster than they would if they were to go to, say, a brick-and-mortar clinic.

[08:48] Michelle: Wow, that's great. I love it. I mean, I feel like that is kind of up-and-coming in healthcare where we go to the patient instead of the patient always coming to us. And I feel like that's truly patient-centered care, right?

[09:04] Sallie: Absolutely.

[09:04] Michelle: Like you said, a lot of our patient population are, they're not mobile. I know here where I live in a rural area, transportation is huge. We have medical clinics that have full-time vans that can go out to people's homes to pick them up and bring them to the clinic, and it's just not feasible so many times. So I love what you're doing. So your clinic, how does it work?

[09:36] Sallie: So I use my own personal vehicle. I do have. We do have our own supplies, everything like that. I have it place orders when I need, you know, extra supplies and whatnot. We do have an office space that we have for, you know, each region or city or wherever we're located at has an office space that we get together as a team. We meet monthly. In fact, this Friday is our monthly meeting. It's kind of fun because we don't see each other very often. So when we get together, it's a good time. We all get to hang out with each other and talk and just spend time with each other and build that rapport with one another. But, yeah, no, we are traveling. Everything we do is done remotely. All my charting is done remotely. I actually am able to do charting there in the patient's home in real-time, which is really wonderful. We use a proprietary program that is based just for wounds. So it's really awesome that it's specialized just for wounds. It has the ability for us to take pictures through our program, all of the above. So we're really focused on just the wound itself. You don't focus on, like, home health would focus on PT, OT, or other skilled nursing things. We are just focused on the wounds.

[10:43] Michelle: Okay, got it. What kind of shifts do you work?

[10:46] Sallie: I work Monday through Friday. I work nine to five, depending on, you know, sometimes a little earlier. You know, you get phone calls from nurses that see patients later, or maybe a patient themselves called me and, hey, this is what's going on. I actually had a son of a patient call me yesterday morning at, like, 07:00 worried about his dad's wound. This is what's going on with it. What do you think we should do? So, I mean, I have the ability to talk to them, and, you know, I have a phone that they reach out to me and everything, but my typical hours on Monday through Friday, nine to five.

[11:18] Michelle: Okay. And what's the farthest that you've gone out, like, in your territory?

[11:24] Sallie: Oh, geez. Probably 2 hours from where I live.

[11:28] Michelle: Wow.

[11:28] Sallie: Typically, that's not very common. We do go, you know, most of the time within, like, an hour's radius. Phoenix is, I live in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and Phoenix is a large city. It's really spread out.

[11:41] Michelle: Yeah.

[11:41] Sallie: So we don't have, we're not a huge group of people of staff that work here in the Phoenix area. So we kind of split the city down the middle. We have a west-side team, which is where I'm at, and then we also have an east-side team. That west side team includes a nurse practitioner, the nurse Mike, who would be myself, and then we have an MA or CNA who works with the nurse practitioner.

[12:01] Michelle: That's fantastic. What a great team. You guys are thinking of everything I have to say, you know, watching the news this morning, Phoenix, man, I feel for you guys. Today is October 1, and you have a forecast for 110 degrees, is that right? 

[12:19] Sallie: That is correct. It was 114 on Saturday, which was awfully hot. That was crazy. It'll cool down in November.

[12:30] Michelle: Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, we're set to be 103 today, and for the next, like, week, we're going to be over 100. So it certainly doesn't feel like fall. There are no pumpkin spice lattes floating around here anywhere.

[12:44] Sallie: We don't do fall here. We do summer, which is extremely hot, and then we do what I like to call mid-summer, which is like, the seventies.

[12:53] Michelle: Mid-summer.

[12:57] Sallie: So, I mean, but it's beautiful. It's, you know, I was born and raised here. I've lived here my whole life, and I've been all over the country, and I've seen snow, and I could not imagine having to wake up every day and shovel snow to be able to get out of my driveway. I wear flip-flops in January. You know, it does get cold. People don't realize that the desert actually does get cold, especially in the evening time. It gets really, really cold. It can drop down to freezing and everything here, too. We sometimes have to wrap our pipes so that the water doesn't freeze and all of that. But, you know, for the most part, the weather is gorgeous six months out of the year. You deal with the heat, and a lot of the things we do are inside. We have an aquarium here. I take my girls to that. We have different museums, things like that, that we take. I take my kids to the children's museum, all that kind of stuff. So a lot of activities inside or. You really know how to. As a person who lives in this area. Hydrate. Hydrating is huge. I drink about four of my big Stanley cups or my hydroflask bottles a day of water. And it's, you know, it's good for education. I teach my patients, hey, you need to hydrate. Hydrating helps hugely with wounds. So make sure that you know, they're taking care of themselves, but I have to take care of myself as well.

[14:11] Michelle: Gosh, yeah, absolutely. The caretaker has to care for themselves. That's fantastic. Okay, let's see where we are. So let's talk about your blog, because blogs are very popular. It's something that I've been wanting to do for a while, but I'm really intimidated.

[14:33] Sallie: I was writing, and I'm still intimidated.

[14:37] Michelle: Yours is so good. Why did you start the blog? Was there a need that you saw that motivated you to do that? Talk about that.

[14:46] Sallie: Yeah. My need was, that I was a brand new mom, and I was working in nursing in this field that is so emotionally demanding, so physically demanding. But being a brand new mom is so emotionally and physically demanding as well. And I wanted to find a community where I could have other people say, you're not crazy for feeling this way. You're not crazy for thinking, I'm going off to this 1213, 14 hours shift because you never know if you're really getting off in 12 hours, right? And all of a sudden, like, I have this huge, overwhelming emotional guilt of missing out on my brand new baby. I went back to work when she was two months old, my little one, and it was really hard, you know? Yeah, you're only working three days a week, but when you work three days a week, you have a couple back to back-to-back shifts. That next day that you're off is like a dead day to me. That's what I think of it. So you have that day where it's. You're just recouping to get back to being able to go back to work again. And I really felt like I needed a community, someone to just see that I was going through the same things that they were going through. And I had a really difficult time finding that. And I thought, okay, you know what? I was talking to my husband and he was like, well, why don't you start something like that? I have a cousin of mine who has a blog that is really successful. She does DIY stuff. Completely different niche, right? It's nothing like what I do, but just watching her, she was a stay-at-home mom, and she wanted to find a community. They bought a house and they couldn't afford to have people fix it up for them, so they wanted to do it. And she was like, I'm going to teach myself how to do this. And I called her. I was like, hey, can you give me some insight? Like, how did you feel about all of this? And she told me, you know, obviously it's difficult. You learn as you go, you get better as you go with your writing style. I have no idea how to manipulate a website whatsoever. I've learned from my mistakes. It's still, I mean, I've just started this a couple of months ago. It's still a learning process, but now I've started to see it. My following is not huge by any means, but I've started to see and get messages from people, hey, I really needed to see this today. I really needed to have someone tell me and validate my feelings. This is okay to feel like this.

[17:05] Michelle: That is so important, the feedback. And, you know, I've said this several times through this platform, is that you know, when, when people go on social media, don't just be a consumer of social media, right? Be a participant. And if you read someone's blog and it resonated with you, there is a comment section and there's a like section. You can like that. You can comment on what resonated with you or maybe what you disagree with, with the blogger. And there are ways on social media to participate for us out there that we're on social media, it's so, so important to us. It keeps us going, it keeps us motivated, and it keeps us engaged. So, man, I'm just going to keep on saying that. Do you have a favorite blog post? Was there a post that just really resonated with your readers, where people were like, yeah, you know, I feel that.

[18:09] Sallie: Yes, actually, I do. I'm sure most people know this. You kind of recycle your posts for Instagram, for your blog, kind of make it, you know, tailor it to whatever platform you're using. But the biggest one that's really hit home with a lot of people has been about bullying and nursing. It's huge, right? We don't realize how terrible we are to our fellow nurses. We're supposed to work together as a team, and we're just attacking one another. We're gossiping about each other. I can't tell you how many times the first day in nursing school, I heard nurses eat their young. That is the worst thing to tell someone. Why would you tell someone going into this brand new career? Well, watch out for the older nurses because they're going to be mean to you. That's terrible. And it's really resonating. I've gotten so many messages from different people, like, telling me, hey, I went through this. I left my job, my first nursing job, because they were just awful to me because they treated me like I was beneath them. They didn't want to answer my questions. And no one really truly realizes how much that affects patient care as well. When you don't get along as a team or you're not willing to help someone out as a team, that patient is going to have worse outcomes than if you work together.

[19:20] Michelle: Yeah, that's been proven. There's some science and research behind that. And that blog post certainly jumped out at me. In episode 69 I spoke with Dr. Phyllis Quinlan, and she's a PhD prepared nurse who has really become sort of the bullying and incivility in nursing expert. One of the things that she said was that the management, the leadership, and the organization have a huge responsibility in stopping bullying. Obviously, it comes down to personal accountability, and it's like we kind of all know what's right and what's wrong. I would hope as adults that we have that internal gauge or meter of, like, I shouldn't be talking to this person this way or about this person this way without this person present. But what do you think we can do as nurses to hold our management, our leadership, and our organizations more responsible for stopping bullying?

[20:32] Sallie: I think one of the big things is we as nurses first need to stand up when we see that happening. If we start displaying, hey, this is not okay. We as nurses say, this is not okay, and start bringing the attention. I think a lot of times we see it happen and then we don't say anything. We kind of, oh, well, that's not my problem. I don't want to get involved in that. But that's not the correct way to go about doing it. What we should do is bring attention to it, because a lot of times I think that maybe management isn't aware of what's going on, and if they're not aware of the problem, how are we expecting them to fix the problem?

[21:07] Michelle: Yeah, I agree with you on that, and I don't know why we kind of back off when we see it happening, but I agree with you on that. I've seen that happen in my own little world. And, you know, I've also had managers where I have approached them and said, hey, this is going on. And the response has been kind of like, I'm not your mom. Don't tattle tale on me, on your colleagues. I'm not your mom. You fix it first. So I think that has to stop. I think there has to be more accountability from managers, from the leaders, and from organizations to say, you know, we have a zero-tolerance policy here and we are really going to uphold that and we're not going to tolerate this. And maybe, like Dr. Quinlan said, up to and including termination.

[22:08] Sallie: Absolutely. I agree with that. I think another big thing, too, is I've heard personally, being in facilities, nurses afraid to go to HR, that HR is not there to protect the staff, but it's there to protect the building. But truly, HR should be there to protect everyone. Staff building, you know, however it works, we shouldn't be afraid to go to HR. We shouldn't be afraid to take the problems that we're having. That's their job. And if you have a fear of that, and that's not an open-door policy with your HR, that's another big issue that we need to work on.

[22:42] Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I echo your sentiments on that. My dad taught me that. So my dad, always a business person, and as a young nurse, 21 years old, starting out really, really green, had no idea how things worked. A lot of us in a unit that I was working on were being bullied by our manager, sadly. And, you know, when I told my dad about it, he said, you got to go to HR, you got to request a meeting, and HR needs to be there, your manager needs to be there, you need to be there, and you guys have to talk about this. And this was in 1986. So long, long time ago, probably before you were born or maybe the year that you were born.

[23:34] Sallie: It was the year before I was born.

[23:36] Michelle: Yeah. So, those things weren't widely done back then, but he said, no, you got to do this. And I did because nobody scared me out of doing it. Nobody dissuaded me from doing it. And I had my dad on my side who was saying, this is the right thing to do. And, you know, I solved the problem. We talked about it. HR was aware of it. They said, you can't do this legally, you know, or really ethically, so stop it. And, you know, I feel really good about that. And later in my career, when I was older, that fear kind of came back like a retaliation. Like, you know, I had kind of lost that, ignorance is bliss. So definitely, I think each nurse, as they see it, if they're witness to it, they need to call it out right then and there, and then they need to follow up with those other avenues. Really, really good information. And such a great blog post. I love that you're bringing attention to these things, these parts of nursing that are really challenging, that hold us back from really being everything that we can be. So thank you for that. You had another great blog post that I loved, and this was called healing from patient emotional self-care for nurses. And you talk about four skills for confronting grief, which is something that we don't talk about to each other and really in our profession, about losing a patient, experiencing grief. But your four skills are self-reflection, seeking peer support, professional counseling, and self-care. So talk about those and how important those are for the grieving process.

[25:37] Sallie: So my first loss, and I talk about it in this post of a patient, the guy was the same age I was, and I made my first death phone call to his mother to let him or to let her know I'm sorry that her son, her baby had passed away. And it was absolutely heartbreaking to me. And I took that home with me, and I actually carried that pain of her voice with me for months, and it started to affect me, so much so that my husband even noticed, like, hey, what's going on with you? Like, are you okay? And like I said, I had a brand new baby and a toddler there at home. I was really having a hard time with, how do I emotionally deal with this. And I had a really good friend who had been a nurse for quite some time. She worked in the ED. I reached out to her and I was like, hey, what do, like, what do you do? How do you deal with this? And she told me that at her hospital she used to work at, they had a peer support group that they would go to to talk about patient loss and things like that. And I thought, wow, what an amazing thing, right? I reached out for peer support. I reached out to a fellow nurse. How do you handle this? This is what she did. Maybe if we start implementing these in facilities, we would have less anger and distrust and things like that, because really, truly, all of those things happen. We go through the emotional grieving process that everyone else says when they lose someone, even as a nurse. And so I started to really think, okay, what is the best thing for me? For me, self-care is the best thing. I really focus on self-reflection. I have a journal. I write it down in my journal. I take time and I separate myself from my family so that I can sit down and really write about how it made me feel. And I go back and I read that, hey, this is the emotions and everything that I was feeling a week ago, two weeks ago, and self-analyze and see where I'm at now and if I need to do anything else, another thing, professional counseling. I feel like we, as nurses, tell people all the time, like, hey, this is what's best for you. This is a great thing, especially psych. I worked in a psych hospital for a while. I, you know, all the time telling my patients, talk to someone, have those conversations, a professional that can help you. I never did those things, and it probably would have been in my best interest to talk to a professional counselor. And now, later on, I have started doing professional counseling, not just related to nursing, but just in general, to have conversations, to have someone that can have an outside perspective and give me maybe a perspective that I never looked at, because we pigeonhole ourselves and think only one way and never really open up. And maybe this outside perspective can show you, like, hey, if you turn, you know, here a little bit, you'll see that it's like this or something like that. So I think that that's a really big thing. But like I said, for me, it's self-care. I love to sit down in a bubble bath and just take some time to self-reflect. Right. In my journal, I. Color coloring is huge. It's just a way of allowing my mind to just drift away and kind of relax without having to have this just heavy weight on top of me all the time. I have a really good girlfriend, and she was telling me a thing she likes to do is when she gets a patient, she'll doodle, like, a picture or something of them. And then if something happens to him, she has a journal as well, that she'll doodle pictures and then kind of write, like, a little blurb about them and what they taught her. And she has this book, she's been a nurse for 15 plus years, and she has this book of patients that she looks back and they might no longer be here, but they made an impact on her. And this is how they made an impact on her. I think that's a really cool way, not only to honor patients that you've lost but also being able to, for her to deal with the emotional stress of losing a patient.

[29:28] Michelle: Yeah, those are very cool strategies. And I agree with the coloring. I think any kind of activity that you can do with your hands, whether it's stitchery, whether it's coloring painting, I'm a big fan of that because it, it's. It's kind of a mindless activity in a way, where you are now not focusing on that. You're, you're focusing on what you're working on with your hands, but it's like your brain goes offline and you're able to then process, process that in some sort of way. I think that's very effective. And I agree with you 100%. I feel like nurses are like Alice in Wonderland, we're really great at giving advice, but we rarely ever take it.

[30:19] Sallie: I'm the absolute worst. I actually had a doctor tell me once, he's like, you're the worst patient I've ever had. Thank you. I appreciate that.

[30:26] Michelle: Yep. Yep. I totally agree. No, those are great things. And I loved that post, again, because you're bringing so much attention to these things that we go through every day that we grieve silently. Sometimes we might feel embarrassed about feeling sad about losing a patient, and we just. It helps us to bring those conversations to the forefront, to seek peer support, and to seek professional counseling. So I think that's so, so important. And, you know, as you have said throughout this discussion, that you are a mom of two and you are a wife. And another of your blog posts, keeping your relationship strong as a busy nurse mom, that really resonated as well. And I can imagine that would resonate with so many nurses. And, you know, again, you said earlier about the twelve-hour shifts, right? We only worked 3-12 hours shifts a week. But in reality, that is really, really difficult because like you said, you might have a 13 or 14-hour shift and the next day you're completely exhausted and you're not really effective and not able to do a lot of things. So talk about the importance of things to help keep your relationship strong.

[31:53] Sallie: So my husband and I, we've been married for not quite six years. We really focus on trying to a couple of times a year take time just for ourselves, just the two of us. No kids, no work. I turn off my work phone. I have no contact with work. Right. And we still talk to our daughters. You know, they'll be with grandma and grandpa. We'll FaceTime with them in the evening, but really take time to spend time with each other. We typically do it once a year at our anniversary and then, like, another time throughout the year. Last December, we went to Vegas for a weekend and went and saw a concert. It was nice just to have adult time. A lot of times when you are a new parent or even a parent that has, you know, 10-12 year old kids, you lose yourself to your kids and what they're doing and their activities. And, like, our daughters go to swim. We did swim last night. The whole night was wrapped around an event for the children. They require a lot of time and attention, but your marriage and or your relationship, either one, require a lot of time and attention as well. Another big thing that we do is when we put our girls down at night, after we're done, we take 15-30 minutes. It doesn't. It doesn't have to be a great length of time, but talk about how our day is, or sit down and watch a show and just spend time with each other. A small little time where it can be us laying in bed and watching something, or, you know, nowadays, right? We watch reels all the time, or we look at memes and things like that, showing those to each other. This made me laugh. This made me think of you. Showing that we still think of that other person throughout the day. My husband and I talk throughout the day. We may not talk on the phone, but we text each other. Hey, how are you doing? How's it going? Just having that constant connection with each other. Otherwise, if not, you start to lose it. And then when your children are gone, if you don't have a connection, what do you have? You have to relearn that person. And we, as humans, are ever-evolving, right? We learn more, we grow as we age. We start to have difference of opinions on things, not with hanging out with one another, but we've changed from what we thought. When I was 20. Now when I'm 37, I completely think of different things as what's important in my life. But maintaining that relationship is huge. I have two parents that I absolutely adore. They've been married to each other for, it'll be 44 years this year. And. Yeah, and my dad was a firefighter, so he was gone every third day of my life. So watching them maintain their relationship and the things that they do, my mom loves to go shopping. My dad, not so much. He'll go shopping with my mom because that's what's important to her. He'll spend doing those things, those times, you know, and vice versa. My mom. My dad loves baseball. My mom could take it or leave it. She'd go to the baseball game. My husband and I are trying to do those things and make sure that, you know, you may like doing this or I may like doing that, but we're going to spend time together because if you don't try and nurture that relationship, then you're going to lose it. And now with divorce rates the way they are, I mean, it's through the roof. I don't want to be one of those statistics. I want us to stay together. I want our girls to see what love is and doesn't mean that we always get along with each other. We fight sometimes like cats and dogs. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's making sure that we take special time every single day to have a conversation, to connect with one another, to ask, hey, is there anything that I can do to help you? Is there anything that, you know, you need attention to be focused on right now? That's what's important.

[35:34] Michelle: So important. Work is hard, parenting is hard, and we really don't want our relationships to be hard, but we know that they can be, and they take work, and putting in that work like you and your husband are doing is really effective in making that relationship last and be really strong and a good example to show to your kids. So that's great. Well, you've talked about being a nurse and a mom, and so how are institutions kind of failing parents, working parents? Because I feel like there are some failures there.

[36:19] Sallie: I think a really big thing that institutions could do is offer childcare. That right there is a huge failure to me. We work these long shifts and it's been a really big struggle for my husband and I both. My husband works long hours as well. And trying to find someone where we can drop our kids off at 06:00 in the morning is difficult. It's very rare that you can find that. Why not provide a childcare facility in your, you know, hospital, put that in place so that maybe on my lunch break I can go see my kids so that I don't feel so much guilt that I'm gone, maybe have it to where, you know, the kids can be picked up after 07:00 because if I work seven to seven, how am I going to find someone to take care of them? That's a huge way that they're failing us. You want us to give you as much time, you request overtime, and you want us to be present. But I also, as a mom, need to be present for my children and their safety. And, you know, making sure they're taken care of correctly is the biggest responsibility that I have in my life. So if you guys help alleviate some of that stress, maybe I could dedicate more time to you.

[37:27] Michelle: Yeah, I feel like it's just a win-win. And I was very lucky to work for an institution that had on-site childcare, and I did exactly that. You know, on my break, I went and saw my daughter, and it made her day better. It made my day better. And I see a future blog post, Sallie, with that one, because I feel like that one is just going to generate a lot of attention, a lot of buzz, and maybe motivate some people to, you know, go to their institutions and say, hey, you know, you guys would be smart if you would do this. Like, let's see how we can make it work. So I think a blog is just a fantastic way of getting the word out there. And there are so many ways to do it. There are lots of social media sites, there's podcasting, there's blogging. And I think. I think you're off to a great start. I really love it.

[38:23] Sallie: Thank you.

[38:24] Michelle: Okay, is there someone that you recommend as a guest on this podcast?

[38:30] Sallie: I have a girlfriend that she has been a nurse for about 15 years. She is from Guam. And so she actually went to school in Guam, which is really cool. She has lived in both California and Arizona and Texas, I believe. So she's worked in many different states, kind of seeing maybe the differences of in California, where you have a union. In Arizona, we don't have a union, which is something that I strive for us to have one day. So she's seeing safe patient ratios here in Arizona. It's not great. So I think she would be a really cool person to have. She would be able to kind of tell you what it's like to have nursing school. Even though Guam is a, you know, a US territory, it might be different there than it is here in the States.

[39:14] Michelle: Yeah, I would love that. Well, where can we find you and your blog?

[39:19] Sallie: So my blog, it's www.bandaidsandbedtimestories.com, and the AND is all spelled out. And then I also have my Instagram handle is also @bandaidsand edtime stories.

[39:33] Michelle: Yes. And I will put those in the show notes. I have both of those. So thank you for that. Well, very cool. We are at the end. And man, I have to say, I have really loved talking to you. I have loved learning what you do as a mobile wound care nurse. And just all the thought and reflection that you put into your writing, I think it's really, really good. I think it's really impactful. And I can see it growing really quickly because you are touching on so many of the critical issues that we have in our profession. So thank you so much, Sallie for coming on today. I really appreciate talking to you.

[40:17] Sallie: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it as well.

[40:19] Michelle: Well, we're at the end. The last five minutes. We do the five-minute snippet. It's just five minutes of fun. So you ready for that?

[40:28] Sallie: Yep. Let's do it.

[40:29] Michelle: Okay, here we go. Convince me to live in Arizona.

[41:20] Sallie: You don't have to shovel, still the number one reason.  I wear flip-flops in January. I can go swimming right now in my backyard, and it's October 1.

[41:29] Michelle: Love it. Okay, favorite game you play with the kids?

[41:34] Sallie: It's not so much a game, but we're really into Play Doh right now, and it's really cool to watch. I don't know if you know what Bluey is. Bluey is a kid's TV show.

[41:45] Michelle: Oh, Bluey.

[41:46] Sallie: Yes. Everything in our house.

[41:48] Michelle: Yeah.

[41:49] Sallie: And my daughter's birthday was at the end of August. I think every single person that came brought her Play-doh. So it's been a big thing. And we've been making Bluey, like, figurines and, like, faces and stuff, and that's been, like, the number one thing that we've been playing with lately.

[42:02] Michelle: I love it. Wow. So how I came to know about Bluey is, I volunteer at a free clinic. And one of the volunteers was like, she's a pre-nursing student. I think she's like 20 or 21 years old. And she is a huge Bluey fan and introduced me to Bluey. And I have to say, after listening to Bluey, it's a lot of. It's geared towards adults, right?

[42:28] Sallie: Oh, absolutely. If anyone listening to this as a mom wants something, a children's cartoon to hit you, right in the feels, there is an episode called Rain, and there's no really no talking during the episode. And what it is, is Bluey is outside playing in the rain. She's running around. She keeps coming into the house, making the house messy. The mom is cleaning all the mess up. And finally, at one point in time, the mom just sits down on their front porch and sees Bluey out trying to make a dam of the water. And she sees her out there and realizes she's missing out on watching her grow because she's too worried about taking care of their house and cleaning and doing all the small things that you have to do to, you know, be a productive member in your house. But also your babies are only babies for so long. The first time I watched it, I think I cried for a good 15 minutes afterward.

[43:20] Michelle: Yeah, I think the writers of that are very clever. So absolutely the most unexpected thing about being a parenthood. 

[43:31] Sallie: Just the amount of times that I am told no, like, I know that no was going to be a big thing, but I could ask, like, the simplest, no, I don't want to. And then you have to explain to them, like, okay, this is why we do this. Once you explain it to them, they're like, oh, okay, cool. But just automatically no is like the first word that comes out of their mouth. And it's not that they're being, you know, disrespectful or anything like that, but just, no, they don't know the words, apparently.

[43:58] Michelle: That's hilarious. And so true. Okay. On the other flip side of that, the most unexpected part of being a nurse.

[44:05] Sallie: How much abuse we as nurses get from patients.

[44:10] Michelle: Yeah. That is a really sad fact. And I would love to talk to, like, a safety violence expert out there on how we can change that because I think that is a big mark, a big black mark on what's going on in nursing right now.

[44:30] Sallie: I agree. And I think the thing that really bothers me about it the most is the fact that facilities are not protecting their nurses. They just let the abuse happen. I mean, I had a patient that was physically violent towards us, throwing God knows what kind of bodily fluid at us, you know, and they just kept him because it was money. And healthcare shouldn't just be about money. It should be about protecting everyone. Patients, staff, everyone.

[45:00] Michelle: Yep. People over profits, right?

[45:03] Sallie: 100%.

[45:05] Michelle: Yeah.

[45:06] Sallie: It's truly sad.

[45:07] Michelle: Okay, so we're in your house, and we see your favorite travel photo. Where was it taken, and why is it your favorite?

[45:16] Sallie: My favorite travel photo would be a photo of my husband and me right before we got married. We went to Hawaii, and we were on the black sand beach on the big island of Hawaii.

[45:26] Michelle: Sounds idyllic.

[45:27] Sallie: Yeah, it was beautiful.

[45:29] Michelle: Yeah. Okay, a couple more. We are in your car, and music is playing. What are you listening to?

[45:37] Sallie: Ooh. Right now? Well, my favorite band is 311. It's like a nineties grunge rock band. But right now I'm really into Zach Bryan, Cody Jinkx, some country music. I'm very eclectic. I listen to a lot of sixties music as well. A lot of Jefferson Airplane, the Doors.

[45:54] Michelle: There you go. You're speaking my language.

[45:56] Sallie: I listened to the Beach Boys because that's my daddy's favorite band, and that's the first concert I ever went to.

[46:03] Michelle: Very cool. I love it. Music can, man, it can evoke so many feelings, right?

[46:09] Sallie: Oh, yeah.

[46:10] Michelle: Okay. Number one quality you want in a babysitter.

[46:15] Sallie: I mean, I would say trust, right? Like that. I know that if something happened, they're not going to try and cover it up. They're going to call me immediately and say, hey, this is what happened. What do I, you know, what do I need to do? What do you want me to do? I want to be able to know that my kids are going to be taken care of and loved just the same as I would take care of them and love them. Or if there's an issue that arises they're not afraid to tell me about it.

[46:43] Michelle: Yeah, man. Just full disclosure, right? And I would add to that, knowing CPR.

[46:50] Sallie: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[46:51] Michelle: Super important. Well, Sallie, thank you again for sharing your time with me. I've loved seeing your black cat walking all over. It's been so fun. Of course, our listeners can't see that. But thank you so much. Thank you for your blog and for bringing attention to these issues in nursing. And not just negative attention, but also, you know, positive attention. I think that's so important, too, because we're in this profession because we absolutely love it. We love what we do. We love one another. We love our colleagues. And so let's celebrate that. And I feel like you do that through your blog, and I appreciate that. So thank you so much. Thank you have a great rest of your day. Stay cool.

[47:38] Sallie: I will. In November.

[47:41] Michelle: All right. Bye bye.