Episode 2: The 24/7 Caregiver

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, hey, nurses. Welcome to the Nurse Dot podcast. Giving nurses validation, resources and hope. One episode at a time. Oh. Today on Nurse Dot podcast.

Jim Reeves

Your friends don't know what to say. Sometimes. But I've got some friends who just show up. And that's exactly. Often times exactly what I need is for them just to show up and then it just recharges me.

Cara Lunsford

Joining us today, Jim Reeves, VP of Enterprise accounts at Reliance, as well as full time caregiver to his 19 year old son who has Down Syndrome oppositional Defiance disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, as well as his wife, who was recently diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. Jim shares how his personal and entire family connections have evolved since his wife's diagnosis and how he maintains a positive outlook that enables him to show up for himself and his family.

I'm your host, Kara Lunsford, registered nurse and VP of community at Nurse AECOM.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, so Jim Reeves, interestingly enough, we were connected by our CEO who who suggested that you be on the Nurse podcast. And when I sat down with you to talk about all the reasons why you should be on this podcast, I was pretty blown away. So first off, tell us a little bit, just tell us a little bit about who you are, what kind of position you hold at Reliance, and then we'll kind of get into who you are outside of work.

Jim Reeves

Okay. I have always worked in sales and marketing, and pretty much majority of my career has always been in health care and that's always been a good area for me because I enjoy it and I enjoy the complexity of it. So I've always done that. I have grown up and managing different kind of teams throughout my career. And then today I actually have responsibility for what we call the enterprise teams, which are the larger accounts in post-acute markets, Health and human Services, a new government market which is really federal government that we are have launched and then obviously the acute space and I'm vice president responsible for that team.

Cara Lunsford

Which is a big responsibility because working in the acute spaces as a challenging area, I'm going to say.

Jim Reeves

Yeah, it is very challenging, it is very complex. And but honestly, that's what makes it interesting because hospital systems seem to do things somewhat similarly. But there there's always a divergence and and it's always fun, you know, to talk to smart people that are trying to figure out how do they advance care, patient safety, all those initiatives. And yet they've got to balance, you know, the assets and the spending and all that.

So it's it's quite a challenge for health systems.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, it's it's tough to kind of get into those areas, especially when I like to say that hospitals and many facilities within health care are if I were to diagnose them as a nurse, I would say that they are in fight or flight, that they are just trying to focus on survival, trying to stop the hemorrhage, hemorrhage being like nurses, leaving at an all time high and and so just trying to keep the staff there and all of those things.

So the stuff that I think you are bringing to the table is also like it will really help a lot of those enterprise companies like the big hospitals to hopefully retain their staff because if we can offer them really great tools and assessments and learning and competency like all of these things in a way that hopefully doesn't take the nurse away from the bedside as long, that's a huge deal.

I mean, that's a huge deal for retention.

Jim Reeves

That's right. It certainly is. And I think the other thing is, is that, you know, one thing that I've come to appreciate over the years working with nurses and nursing executives is that, you know, they really do feel the pressure more than almost anyone else because they're there with the patient constantly and they're asked to do things all the time that they might not have done in a while.

And so there's this pressure of doing it right. Am I doing it right? It's a hit to confidence and it's other things and it's one of the factors that drives burnout. And so it's I have a lot of sympathy for their position in what they have to do. And course they're dealing with the public and the public that is in the bed feeling not particularly secure, naturally worried about their condition.

And that tends to drive, you know, behaviors which are always nice and pleasant for caregivers.

Cara Lunsford

And speaking of that, I would actually challenge to say that you don't have sympathy, you have empathy. And the reason you have empathy is because you yourself are a caregiver. And not only are you a caregiver, but you take care of your family and we'll get into who who we're talking about 24 seven. You are a 24 seven caregiver.

So nurses, yes, we go in, we work 12 hours. And yes, sometimes we do have to come home and take care of other people. You know, that definitely happens. We have sometimes we have family members that are sick or we are living with us. And so we go to work and we care for people. We come home and care for people, but not always Some people, you know, go to work and come home and they don't have to do that.

But in your situation you go to work, but you are thinking about your family. 24 seven, you're on. I've been with you when you've taken phone calls from your son. So let's talk a little bit about your son. First. Tell me a little bit about your son.

Jim Reeves

My son, Sean, he's 19. He will be 20 in July and he has Down syndrome. And he's a he's a smart little kid. He's he's got a great sense of humor. But he also has a couple of other things. He has he's been diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder in something called mood dysregulation, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, which means he'll get an impulse.

And that impulse can be really, really good. I'm going to hell, Dad, or it can be something not so good. And he's likely to act on anything if you don't catch it quickly enough. So he's being treated for that. That's much, much better. We still have occasional issues, but when I travel is when I worry about him because he's very routine and he's very close to me.

And when I'm out of town, he wants to pull my phone up all the time to get me on the phone and talk. But but he's a he's a great, great kid and causes me a great deal of of pride and pleasure. And just watching him grow up.

Cara Lunsford

I've seen pictures of him and he just what a what a cute cat. So when you and your wife first discovered that you have a child, that you you had a child who had special needs, how was that for you? Like, what was what was that like kind of initial experience of I'll say that in one of the very first podcast episodes that we did, we talked about caring while grieving.

And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was that people who have a child that sometimes they have to go through a little bit of grief because they're they're grieving. The fact that the child isn't necessarily the child they thought they were going to have. And they have to go through that before they can kind of like come to this place of acceptance.

And was that something you experienced? Did you feel like you experienced anything like that?

Jim Reeves

Yeah, to some degree, because when when I first found out, I didn't know what inside clicks in a person, it caused them to react one way or another. My first one was fine. I just was going to fight for this kid. And and my concern without knowing what he was going to be like was that, you know, if I can just make eye contact with him and if he can know I'm present, then that'll give me a great deal of joy in satisfaction because I was afraid that he might not know anything, because there might be other complicating disorders that we just we can't tell in utero.

So I was very concerned about not being able to relate to my son. So I never thought, Oh, he's never going to do what I did. He's never going to be in a wrestling team, he's never going to play none of that ever crossed my mind. It was just just let me be able to connect. And it was a kind of a low bar at the time I was hoping for.

But it it turned out way, way better than I imagined. But it was good.

Cara Lunsford

That's beautiful. I think connecting with people is probably one of the most important things we can do in establishing that connection. Yeah, because from there I think it's when we have expectation, right? Like there's certain expectations, then we can be feel disappointed or something like that. But if you just I know you said, like I said, the bar here, but that was the most important foundation that you could have in, in my opinion, that you could have set with him.

How about for your wife? How were things for her?

Jim Reeves

It was it was tough for her. Mary's a very, very grew up in a very academically competitive environment, and she did very, very smart. She got accepted into an Ivy League law school out of college. And so she she always prided intelligence. And when she found out, it really threw her into a clinical depression, she actually did grieve quite a bit.

And that was that was difficult because we found out late in the pregnancy and I you know, she would have found out earlier she may may have wanted to do something different, terminate the pregnancy or something. She would talk about that for years afterwards. And so she was still grieving, you know, for a very long time. But then when Sean was born, she went into a mode more like kind of, like I said, fight.

She was on top of all appointments, on top of all medications, on top of every specialist for this or that. And Sean was seeing a lot of different specialists early on, and she was a she was a powerhouse and then collected all this information and then became a repository and would get other mothers would get referred to her.

So that she could put them out to good doctors, good therapists, etc..

Cara Lunsford

She become like the expert. She had been kind of like she she took all of that knowledge and and that intelligence that she has and she funneled that into becoming, it sounds like becoming an expert on his condition and.

Jim Reeves

Right.

Cara Lunsford

What I mean, what a gift to other people that she was able to provide that you know, that feedback for them and and resources so that they didn't have to go looking for everything themselves. That's beautiful. I think that it's so important to have that transparency and talk about those things because a lot of times people feel really guilty about how they feel.

They're like, Oh my gosh, I I'm going through grief. I feel disappointed. I, I feel like maybe I would have terminated this pregnancy had I known much earlier than feeling guilty about that. It's so important when you when I talk to people like like you and this is really the first conversation that I've had on the podcast about this kind of this kind of care.

You may not know this about me, but my wife, my mother in law had two children with cystic fibrosis a while, and my wife was the third child. So it was her two older siblings that both had cystic fibrosis. So she lived with parents who were chronic caregivers, that they were consistently caring for two children who were not going to survive.

And and they knew that they knew that they were going to have a short life span. How long they didn't know her brother died, I believe, at 29. And her sister Laura passed at ten. And. Yeah, and her so her sister was actually the first to pass and and Laura was the middle child. But and then her brother Mark, who was the oldest, didn't pass until, you know, later when he was 29.

But we've talked a lot about what that what that is to be a like a consistent 24 seven caregiver. So I really wanted to bring this information to the public because I think it's so important to talk about how hard that job is. And it can be rewarding, like I know that it can be rewarding. And so many parents I talked to say I would never, ever have chosen any other child or any other, like I wouldn't have chosen a different life.

Like I appreciate. But it is hard.

Jim Reeves

Yeah, it's different. And I think you have to have a kind of an open mindset and just be open to it. It's I think, you know, there's like this line in this Tom Petty song that says most things I worry about never happened anyway. Well, when you sit and think about what's my future going to be given a set of circumstances.

And actually some people, it's just easy to go because you heard all these stories and but that's not been my experience. My experience has been far better than anything. I imagined earlier. I mean, we've taken taken Sean out to Colorado. He's been on a mountain skiing. That wasn't anything in my mind when I was living with the news about what would Sean's abilities might be or not be and, you know, had to do audio atresia.

So he had to be operated on right after birth and spent 30 days in the McHugh recovery. And what I'd learned from being in the nick of 30 days is that my child was by far the healthiest child in the room. And then other parents were really dealing with very difficult things. And I'm I almost felt guilty about more guilty about that that I'm not out talking about because of all the oxygen they're having to give that their their you know, their retinas are are separating and things like that.

I mean, I didn't have any of that. None of that was going on. And it was quite extraordinary.

Cara Lunsford

Boy, that just really it gave me chills when you said that, because it's so true. Right. We we can always look at our own situations. And and I think it's important to have compassion for ourselves. I think it's important because it is easy to always like, look at other things, other people and say, well, it could be a lot worse.

And and it's true. I mean, when I was a kid, boy, my mom was quick to tell me that it could be a lot worse. And she was right. I mean, and she was right. I also think it's important to validate our own experiences because those yes, we can look outside of ourselves and say, well, my God, it could be this or it could be that.

Or I had an experience once in the hospital that completely changed my life. I had been doing pediatric oncology most of my career, and then I had a kid who and it's so weird because like the name of the disease, it'll actually come to me pretty soon. But like, this literally came to me as we were talking that he had this this disease where the skin like this epithelium, like the skin actually will just come off.

Like literally if I, if I just wipe my hand, the skin can just it's a connective tissue disorder and literally it can just come right off. And basically these these kids or these patients people, they they become like a third degree burn patient over their entire bodies. You're wrapping them in gauze. You're they're having to get baths like every other day.

And the pain is extreme. The fatigue of the parents having to wash their child in that much pain is pretty much unsustainable. I used to have the mom would like basically rally to do the whole bath day, and then after that she would basically need to sleep because it was just so draining to have to do the whole bath and the wrapping and everything.

And and when we had the this kid in the hospital with us, it was because they could no longer do it at home. The father had actually hurt his back, carrying his child, who was now like ten years old and doing these baths. And he had hurt his back so he wasn't able to do it anymore. So he ended up in the hospital.

And then this nurses had to do it right. So the nurses had to like, take him and do the bath and do the wrappings and all this stuff. And the kid would just cry and scream and literally, literally beg to just die. And then we'd get him all wrapped up and he would look like a mummy, a little mummy.

And then he would turn and look at you and go, Do I play racecars with me? And I'll tell you, Jim, that that may have been my moment of like, I don't think I can do this anymore. Like the nurses where we had to start switching out, nurses, Nurses wouldn't come in if they knew that it was bath day that they had to do baths day like nobody could do it.

It was not a sustainable thing. And at that point I was like, I think this might be the worst week like I had seen. So many things. I'd seen cancer and all this stuff and all kinds of suffering, but I had never seen anything like that. And I was like this, you know, might be the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.

And it made me have so much compassion, so much empathy. And then also just so much admiration for these parents. I was like, I don't know how they do this. Like, I do not know how they're doing this. And so that's why I just wanted to, like, take a moment, like give a big shout out to like everyone, like you like them like all the people.

Because I was just like, This is extraordinary.

Jim Reeves

Oh, it's amazing. I just I can't imagine. But there's something in there. You know, obviously not everybody reacts that way. It's like, unfortunate, Like there's a lot of single mothers out there now with kids with special needs because, you know, one one parent or the other decides it just can't handle it. And but I think more times than not and thank goodness something inside people clicks in, they rally.

They rally to the moment because people like this, these parents you were talking about, they had no idea, no training, no expertise. I mean, they didn't get to go to a boot camp to get prepared for any of that. It just hit them one day and then this is the way it is. And I think it's I think it's wonderful that whatever that something inside all of us rallies to the moment.

And that's what makes us in my mind. That's what makes us human.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, it's the human condition, right? I think that you don't know how strong you are until you have to be.

Jim Reeves

Right?

Cara Lunsford

Exactly right. Right. And so now I'm going to I'm I'm going to dip in. You know, you've had you have this extraordinary son. He's got some challenges. He's overcoming some of the challenges. You guys are working through a lot of things. It's going to be a lifelong thing for you. But then on top of it, your wife recently got diagnosed with a form of dementia for frontal temporal.

Was that the.

Jim Reeves

Yeah, that's a.

Cara Lunsford

How is that?

Jim Reeves

She's been it. As it turns out, she's had it for a while before we knew anything about it. And so when we finally got the diagnosis, I was on one level relieved because at least I know what it is and I have to know what it is no matter what. I'm just have to. And we had to go through quite a journey to determine that.

And doctors were thinking, well, it's just early onset Alzheimer's. And I'm thinking that can't be right because their behaviors are so affected. I mean, she's lost her filter. If I take her out in public, she'll see things. It's going to get me beat up, you know, And I can't do that, you know. And so it's when we finally found a a neuropsychology artist who could administer in exams for a point to look for what regions of the brain seem to be not meeting the norm across a population of people.

That was when the person suspected that it might be FTD. So then we went to the neurologist and they will do an MRI and a PET scan. And those are two tests which give you the definitive diagnosis. And that's where where we really learned what was going on. But I sit around with our friends and said, When did we first start noticing Mary's behavior and her mood changes and things like that?

And we went back to late 2017 and I didn't think that, but two or three my other friends said, Oh yeah, it was late 2017. I remember we were here and these events happened.

Cara Lunsford

What was it that happened? Like, what are some things that you for the listeners who are like, Oh my gosh, I've seen some changes in someone in my family or something like that, and they're trying to figure out what could this be or just giving them some sort of information about this.

Jim Reeves

Mary would she would very quickly talk about things that were not not appropriate to talk about. And, you know, it could be almost anything.

Cara Lunsford

They're going to have a hard time, Jim. They're going to have a hard time diagnosing me. I oftentimes talk about things that are not appropriate to talk about. They're going to be like, wow, Cara was born with that. Just it just to lighten it a little bit. But go ahead. Go ahead. Talking about inappropriate things?

Jim Reeves

Yeah, she would talk about inappropriate things and she would just stay on it. And she wouldn't she wouldn't stop. And she had little bitty tics, like she'll tap her fingers on a tabletop just repetitively. So we started noticing things like that. She became she became really defiant before. She's very friendly, easy to get along with. You could you know, she she would go along with whatever the group wanted to do.

All of a sudden that stopped or it became much more difficult. So she became very inward focused and very focused about what she wanted to do and not so much caring what others wanted to do. And that was clearly a departure from what we knew was the No. One. I mean, Mary, I've been married 30 years, so for me to miss some of these things.

Cara Lunsford

What did you chalk it up to?

Jim Reeves

I didn't know what it was, but I knew that it was making it very difficult to just have normal conversations with her.

Cara Lunsford

How old was she at that time when she when that started.

Jim Reeves

She was 58.

Cara Lunsford

Okay. So past menopause, like because I mean, I'm just to be candid, a lot of women change during menopause. They have different behaviors. Some partners might say like what happened to my wife, but she was so nice. She was so kind. What happened to her? I'd like her to come back. So, yeah, for women, that can be you know, that could be something that could blur the lines a little bit.

Could be hard. I mean, at at her age, in her late fifties, she was probably already out of menopause. So that was maybe not something that you considered.

Jim Reeves

Well, it actually is something that I consider because I know people can can go through it at different phases. And I and I was just she at one time had a pituitary gland issue and they removed part of that and I was thinking maybe their hormones or or off a little bit. So I was just speculating and she was going to the doctors, you know, for normal checkups and everything was coming back pretty normal.

I was drawing a big fat zero on all of that. And then finally, I discovered and this was like two years ago, I, I discovered there were irregularities in bills that were coming in. And then I discovered she had credit cards and things like that I didn't know about. All of a sudden, we had a huge amount of debt on credit cards I didn't know anything about.

And then I had to really start taking over, you know, taking control of certain things. And then that was when I was able to talk her into going to this cycle just and taking the test to really begin to see what was going on. She knew there was things going on, too, I believe, early on because she couldn't remember certain things.

And there were always things that were like recent recently occurring, things she was calling them. And so when we got the diagnosis, you know, I immediately just dove into it, started reading to understand what was going on. And it's a pretty, pretty bleak picture for patients with FTD because it's eventually going to shut the brain down and she she will pass away from it.

And before all of that happens, she's going to lose her language skills and her ability to critically think will just go away completely.

Cara Lunsford

I'll be honest, this is like personally probably one of my greatest fears for myself, for anybody around me, like for that for my family to go through something like this. There's something about this type of dementia. And I've worked with patients who have this type of dementia, have early onset Alzheimer's, who also have Lewy body dementia.

Jim Reeves

Oh yeah, that's hard.

Cara Lunsford

Which is a tough one. I mean, Lewy body dementia. Robin Williams had that.

Jim Reeves

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

And what I've witnessed has been just so it's just so hard. It's so hard on the family. It's so hard for the the person that is going through it. I always wonder, like, how much of them is in there? Like how much you know, that to me being like, trapped in your own brain, trapped in your body in a way, not being able to say things that maybe you're thinking that is a special kind of hell.

Jim Reeves

I believe her, too.

Cara Lunsford

And so did she ever have any kind of wishes for how she wanted to? Because I'm a I'm an end of life nurse. This is this is questions that I ask people, like from an end of life perspective. Did she say anything to you early on, before, you know, maybe some of these symptoms, like what her wishes were?

Jim Reeves

No, it was I don't think my experience is like some of the others that I've read and heard about, about people with FTD. Sometimes when a patient finds out they have it, they'll get real angry and they'll go, Mary never went through that. It's almost like she couldn't. Even when the doctor told her you had a frontal temporal dementia, she just said, okay, it's like she couldn't process it.

So she was already so far down that that the consequence of having this did not affect her. Now, she hasn't driven a car in almost two years because I had to take that away because there was no way she could or should be operating her car. And she'll still to this day ask me for my keys and I'll say, you know, you can't eat.

She'll say, Is that because I have dementia? And I'll say, yes. And she's like, okay, so the consequence, she's not processing consequence. And I don't think that's true of everybody experience when they have this. So Mary never she's not in pain. Thank goodness she's not living regrets. Thank goodness sometimes. You know, I've looked at her and I've seen her sitting out in the backyard.

We have a pool in the backyard. She'll stay out there by the pool and I'll just look at her and she's staring off and she's talking. Her lips are moving. And so I'll think I need to just go out there and, you know, spend time with her, see what's on her mind. Because it's like you said it. I don't know what's going on in her mind, but when I do and go out and talk to her, you can tell she gets a little tense and she gets a little nervous.

And so then I'll say, well, you know, can I bring you anything? She says, No. You know, answers are pretty much one or two words, and then I'll go back in. And so I asked the neurologist, I said, I feel like my life is just like evaporating like water from a lake is just evaporating from me and I want to go talk to her.

And he said, Yeah, but when you do that, she can't process the language, so she can't follow what you're saying and she can't plan how she's going to respond next without a great deal of effort.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, it's almost more stressful on her to try and engage and like, the compassionate thing for her is to not engage. But that is very challenging for the people who love her, who want to connect the very, very first thing that we talked about, which was connection. Yeah, we crave it, we want it, we need it. And when that connection is becoming lost, when it's becoming disconnected, it's painful.

It's really, really painful for the people that are getting disconnected from.

Jim Reeves

You know, and difficult for me to to process it and understand it. But it's especially difficult for my son. Sean. And Sean and his teachers are telling him and I'm telling him that your mom's brain is changing and she can't help it. So her brain is changing. And so some of her behaviors, she can't control what she says or does all the time, and we have to just let that go.

But he still he struggles a lot when she does something. If I'm in the room, you look at me and then dad is given black food, it's okay. So then he is okay if I'm down in my office where I am now and they're upstairs, he'll get upset because he's looking for a cue from somebody. How do I handle this?

And he doesn't know what to do with it. So it's a it's difficult for him especially.

Cara Lunsford

To have I don't know how you do this, honestly. Like, I don't I sit here and I am listening to all this and I'm thinking, you're downstairs, you're working, you have a really important job. I realize getting into that market is really challenging and takes a lot of focus, and you do such an amazing job. I've watched you with your, you know, with your people and your salespeople and everyone just loves you and adores you at realize, including our CEO, who pretty much insisted that we have this meeting.

He, like you have to talk to Jim Reeves. And I was like, you have to. It's my arm. I was like, I'd be happy to talk to Jim Reeves.

What he what is your self care? I mean, what do you do? What do you do to, like, take care of yourself, to make sure that you can keep showing up for all these people?

Jim Reeves

It's I have a routine. I mean, the routine kind of keeps me repeating the routine. I, I journal every day I get out at least a page and longhand journaling every day. And that's where I really throw thoughts and feelings out on paper. And the value of that to me is that when I put it out there, it's sort of like if I write X squared plus Y squared equals B squared, you know, if it's a mathematical thing, we all feel compelled to to work the problem.

And if I write something down about how I feel, I can't just leave it there. In other words, this isn't my journal of grievances. This is my journal to keep my perspective. And the most important thing that I can do among all these things and responsibility, these roles that I have, is that I cannot lose my perspective because if I do, I will fail a lot of people.

And so my journal, I work out a lot. The thing I joke about is when I tell people punch about, I don't punch a bagpipe, I like to lift weights. Somebody was asking me, what is what is the weight do for you? And I'm saying, because three days a week I feel like I need to push against something is pushing back and that's not my God.

Cara Lunsford

What a great what a great saying.

Jim Reeves

Yeah, it serves me.

Cara Lunsford

I mean, I would say that one more time that you need to push against something that's pushing back.

Jim Reeves

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

And that is what the weight lifting does for you.

Jim Reeves

That's it.

Cara Lunsford

Man. That's a that I feel like everyone who is listening to this right now, they're all taking that in and they're like, okay, yep, I get that.

Jim Reeves

It certainly is. That fight. Any kind of exercise is where I where I really get to burn anxiety and that helps a lot. You know, I get up early, I get up at 4:00 in the morning. I start then I've got a guy, a trainer to meet me at the gym at 5:00. And so I'm able to get all that done before anybody wakes up, which is my only window.

And then I've got the morning to myself. That's where I can just sit in quiet and journal and plan out my day and just stay through things. And then I kind of, you know, I have to be very organized, get everything done. I have to get done around the house because it's it is truly groceries, cooking, laundry, dishes, all that kind of you got to do it all.

So you got to think about when you're going to do all these things. And sometimes I probably look like a little bit like a whirling dervish, and other times I'll probably look a little more organized. I don't know.

Cara Lunsford

One of the things that I really love about this podcast is that, yes, a lot of nurses listen to it. A lot of people in health care listen to it, but a lot of people just in the general public listen to it. And I think a lot of times we say to ourselves, I just don't have enough time.

Like I don't even have time for self-care. I'm doing this, I'm doing that, doing all these other things, and I'm guilty of it, too. And I have plenty of time for self-care. I just don't prioritize. That's the problem for me. Like I just do not prioritize it. I would say probably everyone that's listening to this right now is like, if Jim Reeves can do it, I can do it.

Like.

Jim Reeves

That's exactly what I want. People when they see me, I don't want to be heralded. I don't want to be lifted up. I don't want to be celebrated. I want them to say, Well, if that guy can do it, then I'm pretty sure I can, too, because that's there is no greater feeling in one's self than to have that sensation to be actually encouraged by what you see somebody else does makes.

You carry it further. That to me is that's nirvana. I love.

Cara Lunsford

That. I agree. I am all about the ripple effect. I am all about, you know what? I may never know the number of people that I have touched or affected, but I know for sure that my goal is to always send out that ripple effect. Yeah, And and I trust and I believe and I have faith that the things that I am doing saying are having an impact in a way that I may never really get to witness myself, maybe until I die.

And if I get to look back on my life and I get to see it all play out, which I hope I do, I hope that happens when when you go like, I would love that. I feel like it's the worst FOMO in the world, like the fear of missing out. I feel like I got to see it at some point, but I just, you know, I just want to say, you know, as we as we kind of like bring this all to a close that I'm just so inspired by you, Jim.

Really, truly inspired by you. And I'm so grateful that I get to work with someone like you. I get to at least every six months or so, we get to spend some time at an offsite together where maybe we get to bike together or hike together or do any of those things are just sit at the bar and shoot the shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you ever need anything, you have a nurse over here that will 100% show up for you.

Jim Reeves

For you are very kind. I say that, you know, keeping my perspective is a is a job. I've got very good friends that help me out. They're always here. So I'm surrounded by a lot of people that really care. And sometimes I think about what they're thinking about, you know, and how are they handling all this. And this is a very you don't you know, it's like your friends don't know what to say sometimes, but I've got some friends who just show up and that's exactly oftentimes exactly what I need is for them just to show up.

And then it just recharges me.

Cara Lunsford

It's so.

Jim Reeves

Beautiful.

Cara Lunsford

Jim Thank you so much for joining me today.

Jim Reeves

Thank you, Karen. And I hope that someone out there is going to be energized and maybe get some ideas because everybody's going through something. So we just have to be sensitive to that.

Cara Lunsford

Absolutely. Yeah.

Jim Reeves

Thank you for.

Cara Lunsford

All my love. All my love to you.

Jim Reeves

All right, Carol, Talk.

Cara Lunsford

To you soon, my friend.

Jim Reeves

Bye bye. Have a great afternoon.

Cara Lunsford

You too. Bye.

If you were a nurse who enjoyed this episode and you have an idea for future episodes, you can connect with me by downloading the nurse dot com app. See you there.