Episode 11: Nurse Antigone

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Part I

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.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Didn't really need to die to do the right thing. And how how nurses have sacrificed their health, their well-being on behalf of their patients. And should that be the bar that we set for ourselves? And yet I think we do. Sometimes I think we have not counted ourselves in in terms of our investment in our own health and well-being.

Cara Lunsford

Joining us today for part one of a two part episode. Special guests, Cindy Rushton, a clinical nurse, ethicist and health humanities scholar. And Brian Dorries, co-founder, the principal translator and artistic director of Theater of War Productions. Cindy and Brian discuss what it means to foster understanding, empathy and recovery through the arts. The recent Theater of War project nurse Antigeni is a poignant testament to that cause, rooted in the timeless wisdom of Greek tragedy.

Nurse Antigone's sets the stage for nurses to voice their experiences, their agony and their resilience, offering both catharsis and communal healing. I'm your host, Kara Lunsford, registered nurse and VP of community at Nurse AECOM. Oh, I'm going to get us kicked off here. First of all, our I'm Cindy Rushton. Okay. I had the pleasure of talking to you the other day.

I always say the other day, but it was probably like a week or two weeks ago, and we were introduced by the amazing Bonnie Barnes from from the Daisy Foundation. And, you know, so she's doing some incredible work. You're doing incredible work. And then when we were on the call, you told me about Bryan. Bryan, Is it Bryan Dorries Door's right door.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

Perfect. Perfect. So you told me about Bryan Doerries and what you did with him and the project that you guys did during the pandemic. And that took us down this whole rabbit hole of like, Oh, this is what we. Oh, my gosh. We have to talk about this. We have to explore how this came about. You know, Bryan's history with with theater and and and how you wanted to kind of shine a light on what the frontline workers were doing and the nurses were doing.

And so were you. Were you quickly just, you know, introduce yourself to the listeners, You know, who you are, what you do. And just a little a little bio, a little bit about yourself.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Sure. Comes into Washington. I'm a nurse. I am a professor of bioethics in nursing at Johns Hopkins. And I do lots of different things, including teaching students and working with nurses, particularly around ethical issues. I co-chair the Hospital Ethics Committee consultation service, and I've been involved for a very long time and trying to think about the ways that clinicians experience ethical challenges and the suffering that sometimes goes along with it and how we can try to harness that inherent moral resilience that we have to meet those challenges in ways that don't degrade our integrity or our well-being.

So that has taken many, many different forms, including research, but also lots of interventions to try to see what might actually be effective.

Cara Lunsford

That's beautiful. The work you're doing is so important, and especially when we think about moral injury and we think about what nurses are experiencing and why they're leaving the profession and how long they're able to sustain it when they're new nurses and the support that's needed. So all the work that you're doing, Cinda, is just so, so admirable and just so, so needed.

So I'm just so grateful for you and for for you being here with us. So thank you so much for that, for that incredible intro. And then you met Bryan. How did you meet Bryan? And then I'm going to introduce Bryan to all the listeners.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Well, we'll have to see what we remember about when we met. It was quite a long time ago, actually. It was when you were sort of exploring the intersection of your work in end of life care, and I was teaching a program which has been in existence now for several decades being with dying, and we were in a conversation about how Bryan's methodology might be a doorway into helping clinicians explore their own experience with end of life care and how that impacted the way that they cared for patients and families.

So that was I don't know, Bryan. It was a while ago. And then we just kept having these intersections and different spheres. Yeah. And, you know, it was one thing led to another and another and another.

Cara Lunsford

So that is a great segway into you, Bryan. Okay. So I don't I don't think I realized that there's the part about end of life care. I'll try not to digress and and and go down that road because that is something that I am personally very passionate about, have done Most of my career has been around end of life and transitioning and all of that.

So I'm fast sedated by what you're about to tell me.

Bryan Doerries

So yeah, so I met Santa, I believe. Yeah. About 12 years ago while working on our End of Life project. So, you know, should say I'm Brian Doerries, the artistic director of Theater of War Productions, and we're a company that uses live performances and readings of seminal texts from a variety of sources, ancient to modern cultures all over the planet, to frame important, powerful conversations about pressing issues of public health and social justice.

And we got our start in hospitals and 2007 series of readings I staged of my own translation of an ancient Greek play called Philoctetes, about a wounded warrior who's abandoned on an island on the way to the Trojan War on account of his own chronic illness by his own community. And the play's about what happens when, nine years later, they come back to get him because they've learned from an oracle that the only way they'll win the war is by bringing him and his invincible weapon to the battlefront.

And anyway, I stages play in a hospital on the Upper East Side in New York City and thought I was pretty clever and knew something about the play. And and we scheduled a short discussion period after for the nurses and doctors and patients and medical students who were there. And it became clear almost instantaneously in the discussion that the audience knew more than I did, even though I translated the play, the audience that had lived, the experiences the play had described as caregivers, as, you know, as as patients, as bystanders, as loved ones, the complex ethics on the page were somewhat theoretical to me, although I had recently lost someone I loved to cystic fibrosis

before working on the play, and that in many ways informed my work. But it it was those who were living it daily that that had something to teach me about what these ancient plays were saying. And teach each other and became clear that by performing a play we could generate a kind of space, which is what theater is about, a kind of a space of transgression where anything was possible for a brief period of time.

So we did a series of hospital readings and then that led to the military at a point where in the U.S. military it was seen as a career ending gesture to raise your hand and say, I'm struggling with an invisible wounds. In 2008, right after the Walter Reed scandal, where, you know, our military medical establishment was seen to be under serving the needs of the warriors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And although I had protested against the wars in the streets of New York, I thought it was a moral obligation to do something. And all I had was Greek and Latin plays, you know. So this is this is what led to me quitting my job and starting a theater of war productions. And and the military was where we took theater of war to scale.

And after meeting a friend of Cindy's, who was a female general and a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army, and and Laurie Sutton, who saw the value in performing Greek tragedies for service members and veterans returning from war. And in a single year, we did 100 performances all over the planet on military installations as a kind of innovative, out-of-the-box intervention of public health and mental health.

And what can happen and this is sort of germane to the larger conversation here is why I'm setting the stage, because we've been doing this now with frontline medical professionals and also nurses over the last year is that we could take a highly resistant audience that had every reason not to talk, that had been silenced in some ways by their own institution.

And we could open up a discussion that never would have happened had we not performed these emotionally charged, ethically complex scenes for them with the kind of actors that we bring to bear with this work. So one of the first performances we did for the military was for 400 Marines and their families, and we scheduled a 45 minute discussion for those Marines and a discussion that first night in August of 2000, eight, nearly 15 years ago, lasted three and a half hours and had to be cut off at midnight.

And everything from Lance corporals to generals wives were opening up and quoting lines from this ancient Greek play, these plays as if they'd known them their entire lives. And quoting them from memory without notes and relating them to their own personal stories. And that is what eventually, because our second project was about end of life care led me to sender.

And that's how Cindy and I began talking, because she was doing out of the box interventions for helping caregivers and medical professionals train and rehearse for being present with death and dying and witnessing suffering. And that's essentially what we were doing to and that's how we started our machinations about one day collaborating on a much larger scale. Anyway, that's a long answer to your question, but I sort of narrative answer because it's easier to sort of contextualize who we are and what we do based on that.

When the pandemic hit, we had already been collaborating with Johns Hopkins University and with Cinda and with the Berman Institute of Bioethics on a number of projects. So it was sort of exciting to immediately go with one of the most trusted ethical sources in the world with regard to epidemiology and what was happening, and to say we're going to focus on medical professionals and their moral suffering.

And we did ten performances right, right out of the gate starting that June or July of 2020, and then center doggedly and persistently kept and persisted. This is great. This is fantastic. Congratulations. We wrote a piece for that together. She led the charge for The Lancet about the frontline work we were doing with the first project. But what about nurses?

What about nurses? We got to do something for nurses and and that's what led to the nurse Antigone, which is the project that we've been doing, we've been part of for the last 15 months, which has been the most exciting collaboration to date with Sinead. What led us to you?

Cara Lunsford

As I was listening to you talk, I was I was literally transported into these audiences. I really felt like as you were talking that I was sitting there with you know, hundreds of Marines and then sitting there with all these maybe nurses and doctors and caregivers. And I have to say, like I I'm really the emotions that are are running through me right now.

All I kept thinking was we have to come up with creative ways of helping people to process their trauma.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

Because it's just and I don't even know that I'm going to have the right words for this, but it's it's so complex. What nurses experience. What what veterans, military veterans experience. There's a lot of overlap. Yeah, there's some distinct differences, but there's a lot of overlap. And I think sometimes it's there's a lack of time to process, right?

It's what you see, what you witness, what you feel. You're oftentimes expected to just you got to put it aside because someone dies, but there's another patient that needs to be admitted. You witnessed something really tragic, maybe something very violent. You think about all the mass shootings and those are, you know, those victims, somebody caring for them. You know, they're getting transported into a hospital somewhere.

Someone is working on those people, caring for those people. It's there's a trauma there that is not necessarily getting processed. And I know for me personally as a nurse, somebody who has done pediatric oncology for probably the first half of my career, experienced a tremendous amount of loss, grief, you know, the complication of of that of going, well, it's not my family, it's not my child.

But boy, do I feel a connection to this family. But where do I fall in this? You know, how do I process this? And I think many nurses and many people in health care are desperately looking for ways that are nontraditional. You know, sometimes you don't want to go and talk about it. You know, sometimes that's not what you want to do.

So I think what you're what you're doing, you know, I just keep thinking, like, how do we do more of that? Yeah, Like, I just want to I just want to make sure that for one, selfishly, I get to see the next one completely selfishly, I want to make sure that I get to see it. And how do we get this to more people?

Like how how can we provide this? It's I see it almost like like a medication in a way. Like if you had this incredible medication, of course, you're going to want to make sure everybody has it, right.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

So tell me tell me a little bit more and incentive. Feel free to jump in here from a from a nurse perspective. When you first started working on this project with Brian, the the Nurse Antigeni project, do you do you consider it a project or what do I want to call it, the right thing.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Right? I don't know what we call it, Brian. I mean, it's an adventure is what it is. It's the nurse. And take any evolving reality might be one way to describe it. So you know, as Brian as you've articulated so, so well, you know, the pandemic just pulled the blinders off problems that had been present in health care and in our society in a way that really made it impossible to turn away from and what we kept hearing, you know, in my work with nurses was this sort of unrelenting crush of ethical challenges every single day, all day.

And, you know, before that, I think those were more episodic. And yet in the pandemic, there was like no relief and there was no space, as you said, for really finding a way to make sense out of it. And the institutions where nurses were practicing were so sort of in a crisis mode that there places of employment didn't feel safe anymore for a lot of reasons.

I mean, safety in terms of just their own health, but also safe in terms of talking about hard things and also not safe because of the violence that was being leveraged toward nurses, both physically and verbally and psychologically in ways that, you know, there was no real relief from. And so when when we started in June of 2020, with the first sort of wave of frontline, we quickly saw how needed it was for these clinicians to have at least a space where through this process of bearing witness to these ancient Greek tragedies allowed them to try to make sense out of what was happening, to give a voice to it, to realize they weren't alone,

and that what they were experiencing was not unique. And so that that was the the sort of impetus. And of course, there's 4 million nurses in this country, and nurses were the ones who in many ways were the ones who were put in the situation where the risk they took was very significant. They were often the people in the isolation rooms when the rest of the team stood outside and they were the ones who were holding iPads for patients who were dying to be with their families.

And so it seemed like it needed a different frame, an innovative doorway into that that wasn't direct, because when you're really in crisis, meeting those kinds of questions directly can just feel too threatening. And so then, you know, Brian's magic is amazing in this context because it it it's so unusual to be invited into that kind of a space and to allow people to sort of titrate how they want to engage, but then finding themselves actually transported into the story of Antigone.

And Brian can talk about how he decided that my integrity. But that really resonated with nurses in lots of different ways. And that that story, that narrative of in response to it, this evolved from the first nurse. I'd taken it to the last one we did.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah. I mean, I just jumping on what Cynthia said, I think one of the things that we observed during those first ten performances where we were casting a wide net in the medical clinician community, everything from respiratory therapists to security guards to greeters to nurses and doctors, like really trying to be as wide and pluralistic, as expensive as we could, because we knew that everyone was feeling the brunt of COVID and was being pushed past their limits and was not able to deliver, you know, care according to the standards they'd been trained.

And so everyone was suffering morally to a certain extent, and everyone deserved a seat at that table. And, you know, we also were very there were productions were very adamant about the more diversity, the more the more collectivism. You know, that's present, the more radically different the perspectives are and the audience, the more powerful sometimes the results, because we're all sort of bearing witness to each other's truths, even if we don't necessarily agree with them, we can hold them in a space and acknowledge them and respect them.

And that that I you know, one of the ideas behind that is that that can be very validating and healing. But it became clear that nurses who played a vital role in speaking during those early performances of Theater of War Frontline, our project at the beginning of the pandemic, many of the nurses that spoke were incredibly vocal. They would they would shift the dynamics of the room.

They had rearranged the molecules of those of us listening, and they would sort of crack open the conversation. But also there were plenty of instances where it was clear that nurses were gagged by the institutions for which they worked, or nurses weren't showing up to the performances because they didn't feel like they could speak and that they were silenced by the institutions for which they worked.

And we saw some instances later where institutions actively silenced and rewrote the narrative of the nurses who'd showed up. So it was clear that there was something that we need to do that would address this for nurses and give them a space and a time and a vocabulary and a syntax and some energy for having this conversation and having it be heard, not necessarily by other medical professionals, but also be heard by the general public.

And one of the things that Cindy's been writing about and thinking about this really inspired the project is that, you know, that COVID as this accelerant that she was talking about earlier really stretched and in many ways tore the social fabric between nurses and the general public. And how do we heal the social fabric? How do we how do we put the social contract back together where America's so-called most trusted profession is treated with the respect and also by respect, I don't mean, you know, thank you for your service or banging pots and pans or fast, facile expressions of gratitude.

But I mean, how do we collectively bear the burden of what nurses have faced as a as a as a culture, as a society? And so what the Greeks offered and it's not the only culture, but it just it's where I started my journey. And I'm an evangelist not for the plays, but for the technology of the amphitheater.

And Greek amphitheater means the place where we see in both directions, where I see you and you see me, these ancient spaces, these theaters, the seeing place, the theater on where we can watch a play, but also see each other's reactions to it. And in some ways, Zoom became the perfect digital, exponentially amplifying version of the ancient amphitheater, something that Sophocles never could have imagined.

And in the fifth century BCE, where we could engage not just a hyper local audience, but a global audience and dialog, and then the potential for validation, the potential for healing. That collective bearing witness was exponential, and it was one of the kind of gifts of the pandemic. I don't fetishize what happened. I would turn it all back in a second, but we should capitalize on what we've been given this these blessings that we could see the inequalities in such a way that hopefully we don't unsee them.

The nurses found their voices and started to express them in a way they hadn't necessarily before, but that they wanted to do before the pandemic and had yet to find the platform and the means. So the nurse and taking he was born out of that sort of fertile ground. And the idea was, you know, let's do something where we not only create the space for nurses to speak and be heard and hear each other and also be heard and exchange ideas with the general public, and not just about the time of COVID, but about the past, present and future of nursing.

And but let's do something else, which is something we've been doing since 2016 with a project. We start with a project called Integrity and Ferguson, where we use the same text and we brought people from the community in Ferguson and in Saint Louis who knew Michael Brown into the chorus of the play. And instead of just having professional actors and we probably should have mentioned most of the actors who perform in our plays are Oscar and Emmy and Tony award winning performers who do this as an act of service, who feel like it's a gift to them to be able to serve others with their craft that, you know, typically before that period, we only

performed with professional actors to catalyze discussions, which really were the main performance where people would stand up and share their stories and truths and take the risk of being present with their emotions and their thoughts. But with integrity. In Ferguson, we decided to build a chorus that couldn't speak, that couldn't preach to itself. Of course it couldn't preach to itself.

A chorus made up of law enforcement and Black Lives Matter activists of people who knew Michael Brown and people who were in the churches of that community, and people who taught him, educators. Some of his teachers were in the chorus and were soloists in the production. And that was a kind of revelation for theater, who are productions that we brought the community into the performance.

It would only deepen the exchange with the audiences that we and we also model a way of coming together. So for the nurse Antigone, we just like Antigone in Ferguson, really. Antigone first and probably should've been called integrity of Ferguson because we didn't set it in Ferguson. It was it was performed by people who are proximal to what happened in Ferguson.

Nurse And the nurse Antigone, as a title, is descriptive of the fact that we created a chorus of nurses that rotated through 11 events who were representative of a variety of services and experiences, who performed the role of the chorus in Sophocles play alongside professional actors and public figures like Margaret Atwood, who played Theresa. As for us during the run and other people and that idea, you know, this essentially signifies to the audience that the discussion starts with the performance.

The nurses reading the play are already beginning the interpretation through the framework of nurses. And the play, as you probably know, is very simply a story about a young woman who stands down the state and risks everything to bury her brother, who's died in a brutal civil war when the state has declared and the king, the new king is declared that her brother, one of her brothers, will remain unburied and she sacrifices everything in service of something that she believes is a higher law than the law of the state and institutions.

The law of love, the law of selfless love. And in order to see her brother buried.

Cara Lunsford

And how did you pick that one, Brian? So how so?

Bryan Doerries

In some ways, you know, we could have picked any play and I'm sure nurses would have found a way in any play from the Greek repertory. But any play that where people were dealing with life and death significance. But the reason we picked and ticketing we've done in other settings, as I mentioned before, as you know, given the gender demographics of nursing, given the misogyny on display in the play, given that it's, you know, one of the one of the chief strategies of our work is that we use distance to create a space by way of ancient plays.

Often that doesn't say to the audience, this is you, but gives the audience the chance to reflect. What do you see of yourselves, your communities, your institutions that you work for, the hierarchies in which you work in this play? So we'd known from experience because we'd done it in Ferguson. We've done it with Bengali women in the Bronx, where they couldn't have talked about the patriarchy of the culture from which they came through a play from their own culture.

But if we put a Greek play in front of them some distance, all of a sudden we're having a conversation about misogyny and power dynamics that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So a young woman standing down an institution and institutional violence, putting everything on the line and in a very open and sort of politically fraught way in front of the entire populace speaking the truth to power seemed like it would be a narrative that would speak to nurses, a story about someone who's willing to sacrifice everything, including her own life on behalf of others, and on behalf of something bigger than herself.

That seemed like it would it would resonate with others. But these were with nurses. But these were the sort of formless hunches. We never go in with it. This is not a didactic medium. You call it medicine, but it can't feel like medicine. Otherwise it falls apart. It can't feel like we're teaching. Otherwise it can't, you know, it can't feel like instruction.

Cara Lunsford

So please go ahead. Oh, it Were any of the nurses who participated, was there any retaliation that they experienced from their institutions? Did they have to get permission to be part of it? Did they have to? What was that process? A great.

Bryan Doerries

Question. So, I mean, kind of back to what your earlier question about how do we take this to scale? I think the way we take this to scale is brave leaders like the leader I mentioned, the U.S. military, Brigadier Lori Sutton, have to say there has to be a time and place that's non attribution, all leaderless nonhierarchical in our institutions where nurses are allowed to speak to each other and to heal.

And that is an act of ethical and moral leadership that I know nursing has within it. But I feel like that's the next step for us. We have to find those leaders. So if they're listening, please call us because we want to bring nursing dignity to your community, but also because it's essential. It's it's you know, there's I don't have to tell you and Cinda about what's happening in nursing right now.

There is so much healing that needs to happen. So we've learned a lot of lessons over the years, You know, and even over the last 15 months, there have been, I think, a lot of instances where if we partnered directly with an institution like a hospital, we risk that kind of hierarchical retribution, because sometimes the leaders who engage us aren't necessarily fully aware of, you know, what they're signing up for or, you know, so you have to experience our work to understand what that is.

So just giving them the benefit of the doubt. But when we do public events and we're engaging a broad cross-section of people from all over the planet, it's less fraught than something that's explicitly about a hospital or a spa. And people can put whatever name they want on the zoom. This was mostly digital work. They can they can activate their video or not.

And it's sort of there's an architecture of consent, which my colleague marginalized. Goldsmith, who runs all of our and produces all of our digital work, is always talking about where in our model you don't have to talk about yourself, you don't have to disclose your trauma, you don't have to reveal what you've been through. You don't have to name your superior.

You can just talk about the play and the characters in it. And that's how it worked in the military as well. So it creates the kind of safety valve or some distance and space where people can speak the truth very forcibly without necessarily incurring retribution. Now have people experience retribution. Of course, people are often talking about safe spaces.

We're not interested in safe spaces. I'm interested in brave spaces. And the actors are taking a risk by reading these crazy Greek plays of very minimal rehearsal. The nurses are taking a risk by stepping out of the box and reading a play and being part of it. And then really the real risk is that the audience takes the risk of speaking the truth in a highly charged emotional state where we're having an ethical conversation about the consequences of our choices in a space, in an is in a state where we're aware of the emotional and spiritual consequences of those choices.

Cara Lunsford

I love that. I love that you said I'm not interested in creating a safe space. I'm interested in creating a brave space because nurses are brave. I mean, they're incredibly, incredibly brave individuals. And and recognizing that in them, I think also provides an element of healing center like So when you first saw this, how did you as a nurse okay, purely not academic, not just like where did that where did it hit you from?

An emotional place.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Like every single you know, we've said this so many times when you've seen one, you've seen one. But every single performance hit in a slightly different place. You know, I think where I started was a real identification with Antigone of standing up for what I believed was right, you know, and sort of really resonating with that sort of unrelenting purpose, you know, that I'm I'm going forward no matter what.

And and also the, you know, the the image of CREON as this leader who didn't listen and how many times, you know, I've been in this situation of bringing forth issues that were dismissed or minimized or, you know, we'll just give you some chocolate or a pizza and you'll feel better. So it was it was resonating with, you know, gosh, I've been a nurse for a long time and there were just many, many parts of it that were like, yeah, I know that space.

And seeing, you know, sort of seeing yourself in from a lot of different dimensions, you know, and, and also this idea that didn't take any need to die to do the right thing, you know, and how, how nurses have sacrificed their health, their wellbeing on behalf of their patients and should that be the bar, you know, that we set for ourselves.

And yet you know, I think we do sometimes I think we have not counted ourselves in in terms of our investment in our own health and well-being and so, you know, it was a.

Cara Lunsford

Partially a cautionary tale, a little bit of a cautionary tale in some way that, you know, don't don't let this happen to you kind of thing. But like, you don't have to die now. You know that like, it is okay to of course, you have to speak up and, you know, truth to power and and and all of that.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

But At what point, you know, what are your limits? What are the limits of that? And and I think the other the other thread that has resonated throughout all of it and we've been talking a lot about amongst our group of facilitators of this process, I guess I would say is it was such an interesting trajectory of responses and and how the words of the play began to create a vocabulary for nurses to speak about their experiences that in many ways had been unspoken and even maybe didn't even have the language to express.

Why does this matter? We heard that again and again and again of nurses making those connections, of feeling ineffective in in delivering care. Or, you know, as Brian said, the dissonance between this is what I was trained to do and this is what I'm doing, and how do I see myself as a good person or as a good nurse when I know there's more that I could do, or that I'm not doing this in a way that reflects what really I stand for as a nurse and and over time, sort of seeing that trajectory unfold over the 11 performances and we were reflecting that it had an arc to it.

And, you know, at first people were pretty shut down. And then as time went on, there was this amplification of voice where nurses were able to speak in a different voice about their experience. And some of that had a tone of activism and, you know, outrage and, you know, sort of activism. But there was also, along with that, a sense of confidence, you know, that that we we belong here and we have something that needs to be said and heard and understood.

And we are in this amphitheater that includes the public, which we need as allies to support us to do what we know how to do best. And you know, that that was just I don't think we could have expected that. We just certainly didn't have a roadmap other than we were going to focus on different aspects of nursing.

And to Brian's point, you know, to to engage professional organizations as a as a way to to reduce some of the possibility of retaliation because we were recruiting through organizations outside of health care to engage nurses. You know, so the critical care nurses, this student nurses, sigma theta tile, you know, community health organizations.

Bryan Doerries

Hospice and palliative care.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Hospice and palliative care, that was the sort of partnership that helped us to have access to these different aspects of nursing and to also highlight how many different ways that nurses serve.

Cara Lunsford

Oh Stay tuned for part two of this very special episode. 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. Nurse Dot is a nurse dot com original podcast series, production music and sound editing by Dawn Lunsford, Production coordination by rear Wade, Additional editing by John Wells.

Thank you to all the listeners for tuning in to the Nurse Dot podcast. Until next time, keep spreading the love and the care.

Part I

Cara Lunsford

Oh, hey, nurses. Welcome to the Nurse podcast. Giving nurses validation, resources and hope. One episode at a time. Oh. Welcome to episode two of this two part series featuring Cindy Rushton and Brian Vries. Let's go ahead and pick up where we left off.

Bryan Doerries

I say that, you know, one of the things that also early on and it was a theme that played out throughout, we had a lot of people who I mean, in our survey results, there were huge numbers of nurses who said, I recently left the profession and we had many raise their hands or that we purposely curated in our panels who had recently left the profession or tapped out during COVID.

I think for them to hear from other nurses who didn't leave, you're still part of our community. You know, you should bear no guilt for saving yourself or serving not just the needs of others, but those of your family or those you love. That was a type of healing that I think was really critical as well. The re stitching, the fabric that had come undone.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

It's a really good point, Brian. Yeah. The idea and this is another theme for me that really started to resonate. You know, we belong here. Like you can belong in this profession. Even if you decide the role you're in is not the one for you. There's other ways to serve, you know? And that that we are a community in many, many different ways.

And this idea that that we could still belong, even if we had decided that it was time to take a step back, doesn't need to be permanent.

Cara Lunsford

Absolutely. I you know, for me personally, during when the pandemic all started and happened, I felt this this pull, this draw, I was like, well, I have to it's like I have to enlist kind of thing, right? Like and and suddenly I started to think, well, if I if I don't. Am I, am I abandoning my community? Am I.

Am I not showing up for them. I have seen myself as a leader for a while. I've been cultivating community and support for nurses, and that's been my whole focus. And then I thought, well, who am I if I, if I don't go to the front lines, right? Like if I don't put myself in the in the trenches with them.

And they're and there's so many military war like analogies that you can, you can make. But, you know, at the time I decided I'm going to save the nurses. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to focus because I. I knew where we were. And this was even before the pandemic, we were in danger. We couldn't sustain this profession.

And so seeing that now we're in a pandemic, I was like, I have to stay in support of the nurses. I can't go to the frontline. I have to stay here, and I'm going to continue my focus here. I did some of the first nationwide nurse surveys of nurses during the pandemic. We were on NBC's Nightly News talking about this first nationwide nurse survey and what nurses were saying.

I have tens of thousands of comments that were written in the survey that were lengthy. We did it during April of 2020. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that survey? And I read these comments, every single one of them, because I was like, if I can't be there, the very least I can do is read every single message, comment, plea for help, because that's going to charge me.

It's going to give me the energy to do what needs to be done to try and save them. And I'll never forget I was talking to a nurse who was a travel nurse, and she had traveled back to New York in the very beginning of the pandemic when things were just at their worst, just really bad. And they were being bussed into the hospitals and back to the hotel and to the hospital and back to the hotel.

And she was on a bus, headed back to the hotel with another nurse who was just kind of had her head in her hands and was crying. And and she said, did you have a really hard day to day? And she said, Yeah, I did, but that's not what I'm upset about. She said, I'm going to go back to the hotel and I'm going to talk to my five year old and tell and listen to her cry until she falls asleep.

And she said, I wish my kids could forget about me. And it just like hit me. And I was like, oh, my gosh. These are women that have gone off to war.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Mm hmm.

Cara Lunsford

And it's like almost too painful for them to have to constantly live in two places, you know, see all that trauma and then come back and listen to their child, miss them and cry for them, and, you know, wonder when they're coming home just to the very next day. Have to go back into it. It's like they almost have to put that they have to put like the blinders on in order to be able to go into that place and stay in that place.

But to go back and forth between being a mother and being a nurse is almost impossible task of anybody. So and yet.

Bryan Doerries

This is what the Greeks knew. They they knew that that that so the audience in the ancient amphitheater for Antigone in the fifth century B.C. would have been citizens and some foreign nationals, all men. So we can talk about that briefly. But except for the high priestesses who sat alongside the generals in the front rows and it was 100% military service of citizens, compulsory service.

So the audience would all not just been to war, it was a century in which they'd seen nearly 80 years of war. So the fabric of the society hung in the balance of the warrior moving back and forth between being on the battlefront and being a and functional member of their family or a citizen. And the Greeks knew that it was not, you know, for all their faults and, you know, there are many, but they knew out of necessity that it was not functional when in the middle of battle to be overwhelmed with emotions.

But they also knew and this is where we lack as a culture and society, there had to be a place in time where those emotions could be processed. And the theater was that place. It was a place of communal and collective healing where permission was given, actually. And one of the you can say it that way, that that that the audience was invited and encouraged to bear witness to the truth of their experiences in the company of each other, seated according to rank and according to community.

So we did it for the military because the military is a great close analog to that ancient audience. But nurses are also, as you just articulated so beautifully, an analog that that and there has to be a time and a place for those emotions to be expressed so that the nurse, even in her in her normal day forget the pandemic, can move porous between pediatric oncology.

I mean, I remember we did a Greek play at our end of Life project at Saint Louis Children's Hospital for that. And the pediatric oncologist, nurse responded to the play, which was about the Greek hero Heracles, who's been poisoned by his wife. And the play shows the poison, sort of reducing him in a matter of seconds from the greatest Greek hero to a shallow himself on stage, eating through his flesh.

And the nurse said this reminds me of the children I've seen who have been attacked by flesh eating bacteria. And I've seen this. I know this and. And then one of the questions that one of the lines at the end of the Greek play that we perform for the nurses at that hospital is in Sophocles play women to Trekkies.

My friends, you've seen many strange things, new kinds of torture, immeasurable pain, and all that you've seen here is God or in the Greek of Zeus. And so one of the questions I ask audiences is, what do you make of that line? And the pediatric oncologist nurse raised her hand again and she said, if I didn't see the Divine in my exchanges with these children, if I didn't feel that this was sacred, there's no way I could face it every morning and every day.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, my God. That's exactly. Oh, boy. Yeah, that. That. Yeah. I mean, so perfectly said and so poetically said. And I know I've said something similar, you know, not not exact, but similar. Where it's like, I know I have to believe. I have to believe that I am in the presence of God. I'm in the presence of something more divine, something divine to make sense of it and to move through it.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Now I think, you know, it is that it is that dance that we have, you know, that we think we can't exhale. And I think that was, you know, it's like we're all holding our breath, trying to manage this incredible situation that we're all in. And then, you know, we we have this idea in our mind that if I just let a little bit out, I'm going to implode.

And how will I keep coming back if I allow that to happen? And yet I think through the through the medium of the theater, people are invited into at least a little bit of an exhale to give voice to and to relate to something outside of themselves that allows for a sigh, you know. Oh, you know, and I think that invitation to reconnect to why we do this work to me, has always been a huge resource, you know?

And when you're in crisis, it's hard to connect to that because all you see is the pain and suffering and the despair and the discouragement. And so in a way, you know, to to have even a little moment where you can remember that it it gives us the energy to say, okay, well, I'm going to do what I can.

And it's not perfect. And it's not maybe what I would choose, but it's what I've got right now.

Cara Lunsford

And yeah.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Being able to to kind of befriend our limitations rather than criticize ourselves for.

Bryan Doerries

That. Yeah, that's so huge. I mean, we'd say too, in our to our actors a number of things. One is we say anyone who makes a mistake gets a bonus because we're modeling, making mistakes, and creating a space in a culture where we can celebrate and revel in the fact that we can be present with our thoughts in such a way that it feels messy and unedited and like theater.

As you'd said in the beginning, we also say make them wish they'd never come. Not because we want to retraumatize the audience, but we want to create a kind of field of energy, not to get too esoteric, but where the nurses kitchen sink realism is being met by a Greek tragedy that, for others feels extreme. For them, feels like naturalism, you know, something they experienced earlier that day and that that can be really validating.

And also help create a space where just takes a little less energy to talk about it, because the actors have already named it and they've already been as emotional as anyone's going to get in that room. They've already moved the walls, the room back and said, You know, the actors have gone to these places. It's okay to go to those places here because this is the place.

So, you know, you said that the play's a cautionary tale. It is a cautionary tale. I would argue the Greek plays are about people making mistakes and often learning too late, usually milliseconds too late. In those milliseconds, they destroy themselves and their families and generations to come. And we watch these plays, not to go home and like make more mistakes.

That's a really fatalistic view of why people would go to the theater over and over and over again every every year in the spring in ancient Athens, we go to the theater to raise our consciousness to a place where maybe we have the presence and the self understanding and the wherewithal to and the space that Brexit Senator was talking about to avert disaster before it's too late to acknowledge our own habits to make a change.

But I actually think the real power of Greek tragedy is simply in naming these things. And then targeting in particular for the nursing community is it's the hope is not in the play. The play is about someone who ultimately dies. And we all agree that she didn't need to die. And that raises all kinds of questions about what why we fetishize the sacrifices of especially women and our culture and the play that she says she calls out to the citizens to help her.

And they say, well, worship you like a goddess after you're gone. And she says, Shame on all of you. Not one of you will do anything to save me. And yet you dare to say that you'll worship me. And we say, I'm coming to say I wanted to save the nurses. I feel like one of the ways we have to save the nurses is not by fetishizing them or worshiping them, but acknowledging that we all make mistakes and getting down in the trenches in the mess of those mistakes with them and saying, Well, the blood's in our hands to.

Yeah, yeah.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

That's right. That's really, I think, Bryan, the intersection of serving nurses by creating spaces for, for discovery of who they are and what they carry, but also to, to really take on this question of our relationship to the people we serve and them to us. Yeah, that includes the patients and families, but it also includes our leaders and society and the organizations where we practice.

And why is it that in a way, many of those structures have corrupted the commitment that nurses have to their patients in order to serve their goals? And I think that is is part of why having the public witness what nurses do and how they how they serve and what they sacrifice in order to do that is part of shifting that narrative to say this is a bi directional responsibility.

It is not just on the most trusted nurses, it also involves the people who are the recipients of their knowledge and their skills and their caring, and there are.

Cara Lunsford

More of them than there are of us. And if you can get society and the public to rally behind the people who are serving them, the people who are caring for them, the nurse outcome mission is to measurably improve the lives of the most vulnerable in society and those who care for them. That's our mission. And we cannot measurably improve the lives of the most vulnerable in society.

If those very people do not understand what their caregivers are facing and the obstacles that they're facing, and to help them with policy, to create policy for change, and to create safe patient staffing and to they are the recipients of this. They are the the one of eight, you know, or the one of ten. And I spoke about this with with Michael Bublé when I when I interviewed him during Nurses Week.

And he said very profoundly, he said, what can we do? What can we do to advocate for you, the collective you? And that is exactly it. It's through education, it's through enlightenment, it's through knowledge, it's through compassion and empathy and understanding that you want to advocate, you know? And that's what I think you're offering Bryan and Cinda and I'm just really I don't even think I've had a chance to really process even this conversation.

I've been like in the moment, but I'm not even sure that I've had a chance to, like, process everything I'm feeling and thinking and and planning in my head and, and, and trying to figure out how I can get this to every person on the planet.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Including the.

Bryan Doerries

Nurses. Funny you should mention that. You know, it's exactly where we are in the process with this particular project. We just finished these 11 performances, one of which is online. You can find it on our YouTube page. The finale. It was live at the green space in New York City and featuring Anthony Edwards and added Paro de and Katy Irby from Law and Order and a chorus of nurses representing a variety of perspectives and an audience full of nurses sitting alongside citizens who came to be in dialog with them and you see modeled and then a global audience, you know, 15 or 16 countries represented online that are all tuning in and being brought into

that space. And you see the model in the flesh. If you don't believe us, you can just watch the video. Those are you listening and hopefully that just a lot more helpful, I think, than hearing us talk about it. But we are actively looking for brave, sound, ethical leaders who are risk averse and willing to help us take the project to scale within institutions and outside of them.

But I do think that thank you for signing up. I appreciate that share. I think I think the the challenge is, you know, for instance, in the military, there were about 15 generals, ultimately, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his wife, who championed our work. After General Sutton. I mentioned Lori Sutton sent his friend who took the idea to scale that first year.

But for every general that didn't, who did want us to go to scale, there was at least one general who didn't because of how threatening sometimes it can be to leaders to feel unsafe, that they're that they're not in charge, that we created these leaderless environments. What could people say? And so we have to find those who are willing to take the risk, but also know that the risk is necessary in order to create and generate the healing that has to happen.

The other really thing I try to say is that it's been really exciting to be with nurses over this 15 month period. We had a number of people who were in nursing school at the beginning of the journey who had done a full year of working in emergency rooms by the end, who came to every performance and participated in the discussion and it felt like we were meeting nursing where it was as it evolved over that 15 month, extremely accelerated period of change within nursing and the voices we were hearing at the end, and these are on display at the video that is online in our YouTube theater board productions, YouTube channel, our voices not

just of speaking truth to power, but voices of progress and change, and a full throated articulation of the need for change and what has to change. And it was powerful and exciting to even be a small part of that process and to be a platform for nurses to express that to a larger public. We got a few articles in New York Times, the AP, in the beginning that amplified, but there's more to be done.

Obviously, we scratched only the beginning surface of what's out there in terms of the nurses we could be engaging. So we're grateful. I'm grateful to you for.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Your.

Bryan Doerries

Opportunity and.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Care and care of the other piece on the public. You know, as Brian knows, I get to be in my bonnet and I'm not letting it go. So because of this sort of frayed social fabric, as Brian described it, we wrote a piece in the Hastings Center blog of When There are No More Nurses. And that generated quite a response, both by nurses but also the public, and led to a collaboration with AARP and Suzanne Reinhart to create ten things the public can do to support nurses as a way to begin to give some specifics about starting first with knowing what nurses do, not these ideally pleased care tours of us, but the real, you

know, skill, competence, innovation, you know, that nurses bring. So I think there's many different, you know, sort of pathways here in this process not only about engaging nurses, but also, you know, what would it look like if, if we really truly had the public as our ally and who we could stand together with to be able to say no more?

This is not working. It's not working for patients or families or the people who are trying to deliver care. So, you know, we'll see what happens.

Bryan Doerries

Cara. Forgive me for being impulsive, but I actually think the next step would be for you to join either the chorus or and I say that I knew that eventually if we called something the nurse Antigone, eventually we'd have a nurse and Tegan, a that at some place. Maybe. Given your emotional presence and your facility with language, you play Antigone for us for a large audience.

So you heard it here first.

Cara Lunsford

Listeners Oh my gosh. I would. It would be maybe my greatest honor.

Bryan Doerries

Okay, well, the offer stands. We'll find a place in a time. And this is how casting happens. The Theater of War productions, by the way. We don't audition. We just sex once, right?

Cara Lunsford

Well, honestly, like what? What an honor. What a what a privilege. And and thank you for for offering it to me. I would absolutely take that take on that role. And and I hope that I do it a service that you know, it deserves. So we'll.

Bryan Doerries

Find it. We'll find the opportunity and we'll stay in touch. Okay?

Cara Lunsford

All right. All right. Well, I have.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Kept you.

Cara Lunsford

So long, the both of you. But and I probably I may even have to make this into a part one. Part two, because it's so good. It's just it's such a good it's such a good episode that I'm like, oh, my gosh, I think we might have to have a part one. Part two, It's it's so good. And everything that the both of you said, even just in this podcast, I think will provide so much healing and hope.

You know, we this podcast I don't know if you you know but we we started by saying providing nurses with validation resources and hope one episode at a time because the pathway to healing, you know you have to start with validation, right? Like you have to validate people's experiences and that is exactly what you're doing. Brian In the most eloquent of ways and creative of ways.

And so I'm just people are.

Bryan Doerries

Often put off by the idea of tragedy, you know, and they hear it and they I mean, they're I'm put off by it. If someone put a sign up saying Greek tragedy being read, even I might not go. But because they think there's no hope. But I would argue like we were taught wrong in high school or those of us who had the privilege of reading Greek play, some not as better to work with audiences who've never heard of Greek plays.

We don't have all the baggage and it's just the direct experience that's there. Sometimes education can be an impediment to direct experience, but people always ask me, Where's the hope in these ancient tragedies? And I say, The hope isn't in the place. The hope is in the audience that comes together to bear witness to the truth that's spoken in the place.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Yeah.

Bryan Doerries

And that validation is that's the that's the beginning of, as you say, the path, the infinite paths to healing that can come out of that recognition that I'm not the only person on the planet who's ever felt this way, not just in my community, not just across the country, in the world, but across time.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

Thank you. Thank I thank you so much. Send a thank you. Thank you for making this introduction. Thank you, Bonnie Barnes, for introducing me to send a big thank you, Brian, for just being willing to share this journey to show up. I mean, you're just showing up.

Bryan Doerries

Can't say I wish I hadn't had center after me for so long, but.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

I hear like, Oh my God, I'm going to have to do something. So she will stop.

Cara Lunsford

Well, there you go. I mean, the squeaky wheel gets the oil and that's what you did.

Bryan Doerries

No, I mean, it really.

Cara Lunsford

Actually got the Bryan.

Bryan Doerries

All joking aside, I mean, you know, the not to hero worship or fetishize nurses, but I you know, as I mentioned very offhandedly earlier, I lost someone I loved to cystic fibrosis and was on every service in the hospital as a caregiver, as a young person, and 20, 25, 26 years old at the time. And it was it was apparent to me when I was in my mid-twenties as a caregiver, especially with the hospice and palliative care, but across the services that that nurses had insights that could heal us all and that they were marginalized and silenced and that it was at our own detriment as a society, that we couldn't hear their insights.

And that's sort of where this end of Life project started.

Cara Lunsford

Who was the person to you?

Bryan Doerries

Oh, her name was Laura Rosenberg, and she wrote a book called Breathing for a Living. And there's a beautiful radio diary on NPR called My So-called Lungs. These are things people can find very easily. She was a writer and we were writers together, and she had cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant. And in her this is in 2000, essentially 2001, 2000, two, when she has the book and then died in 2003 20 months post operatively in our apartment in the East Village where I live.

I don't live in the same apartment, but in the East Village. And and it was a crash course for me in medicine and caregiving and being pushed past my limits in moral distress and maybe even moral injury, although I didn't have any of those words. And I would argue it took me a hundred performances of doing this work a few years later when I started doing it in hospitals and then military in prison, and then also other places that really I was just I was doing it for myself.

I didn't know that. But I needed to create the conditions where people would talk about the things that I had experienced, including death, especially death. Because for me, death wasn't the death, The deaths. The death I witnessed was not dispiriting. It was an opportunity. And I felt like if we didn't talk about the opportunity around death.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah.

Bryan Doerries

That we were missing the greatest gift that we've been offered as as mortals. Yeah. And and so creating spaces where people would talk about it without the intervention of drugs or alcohol, without, you know, long yogic practice like that, people would just go into these places and they would open up. After hearing a 40 minute reading from an ancient text, it was it was as much for me as it was for them.

And so, you know, and Cindy knows this, too, because every time we do one, it gives us more energy than than it takes. Yeah.

Cara Lunsford

You know, my wife, I lost both of her siblings to cystic fibrosis, which is why I asked. And I actually just recently interviewed her mother, who is 92, about the experience of caring for two terminally ill children. Now, I recently interviewed my wife about being a sibling in a house where you could feel unseen if you weren't dying, if you weren't terminally ill.

And so I love Ted. Dig in to the topics like I like to I like to pick it up a little bit. I like to pick the scab and then kind of dig around in the wound. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sort of what.

Bryan Doerries

We do, I guess. Yeah, we don't advertise it, but yeah, no cystic fibrosis. So you know. Well we, it's another episode but yeah, we're about to publish Laura's poetry 20 years later, her mother and I and it's called When Poetry Visits. It'll come out in the fall. It was Laura's dying wish that her poetry be published. And it's the title of the collection.

When poetry visits hours and hours, Poetica is about the relationship between poetry and cystic fibrosis for her, her illness and her creative output.

Cara Lunsford

And I wrestled with it, so I would love to. We have a segment we call the Dart Spot, and we don't put it into every episode, but we do put it into certain episodes. Yeah, I would love to do a dog spot where I read her poetry both in my wife's episode and oh great episode. That would be.

Bryan Doerries

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll send you to the galley and I don't know, we don't have a pub date quite yet, but. But I also send you a link to her book, Breathing for a Living, which was published by Hyperion in 2000. Just after her death. She wrote the last chapter on her on her deathbed.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, I would love that. I would love that.

Bryan Doerries

But it's amazing how COVID has made CSC way more relevant as a respiratory illness, where I think a lot of S.F. patients felt very marginalized and now everyone's had a respiratory illness and they and they kind of know what it is to be like, you know, fearful of air hunger or, you know, see people and.

Cara Lunsford

Walking around with masks on with.

Bryan Doerries

Masks and knowing that because that was the that was the real thing for Laura. You know, the how inventively cruel cystic fibrosis was to those patients in the nineties early nineties who up until a certain point were all in the same ward together in the hospital and formed families and communities and bonds and then because of a certain bacteria cepacia we're told they couldn't see each other anymore and be in each other's presence.

And there wasn't Zoom obviously. And, and then she lost all 25 of her closest friends and she was the last one. Yeah, but she had to write their story. That's what she told me. She survived to write a story, so she wrote Breathing for a Living. And then she did this radio diary that was a driveway moment, I think in 2001, 2000 to air on NPR's All Things Considered.

And when you hear it, and I'll send that link to, you'll hear her voice and she records herself and her breathing and her voice moments after she wakes from awakens from having a double lung transplant, which no one thought she she'd make it to. So of course.

Cara Lunsford

With having eyes, I could talk to the both of you all day. I mean, honestly, I think I. I'd just, like, tell everybody, like, No, I think I'm just going to stay on this call and you know, the rest.

Bryan Doerries

And I'll send you the links.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

And it's really what's really interesting. And Brian, I don't think you know this. You know, I started out in pediatrics when I was a nursing student. I worked on the ward with patients with cystic fibrosis. It was the first death I witnessed. It was the same thing. Many families had two children, one in each doing chest percussion, trying to, you know, help help them breathe.

It is it it's such an interesting connection, you know, of of how that disease teaches us about living.

Cara Lunsford

You know, so like breathing. Just breathing, you know, I don't know. There's just something about. Yeah, I know. And I feel like, boy, we should just all have a drink one day and sit down and just really dig in to, like, what that is. Like. What? Why are we experiencing, you know, that thread that is even just running through now, the three of us?

And then my wife is the producer. Yeah, I don't know if she know this, but she is an Emmy Award winning sound person. She's won an Emmy for her work and she produces this podcast. She does the sound and the music and everything around it and, and, and so I she's not here, but she's here now. You'll hear it and she will certainly hear it.

I almost don't want to I'm going to surprise her and like, let her listen to it because of this.

Bryan Doerries

And it's so great.

Cara Lunsford

And I just want to say I just want to say thank you because, well, for one, if I don't get a proper goodbye from you, even if you don't leave, she'll kill me. She'll be like, Cara, how did you talk to these people for so long? And you didn't get a proper goodbye? Yeah.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Well, so what does that look like?

Cara Lunsford

A proper goodbye is really just, you know. Thank you. Send. Thank you, Brian, for joining me, for being with me today, for sharing all of this. And I cannot wait to talk to you again and to explore future opportunities.

Bryan Doerries

Thank you, Karen, for hosting us. And and I've done a number of podcasts. It's really nice to be in a conversation that really feels like one where the host is so present has been it's been a really great experience and exchange. I'm excited for listeners to hear it and then for us to be able to engage with them.

And I'm excited for you to play and take any.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

And he doesn't give up either. That's why we probably hang out because we're both unrelenting.

Cara Lunsford

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'll let you guys enjoy the rest of your day and and I will be traveling to New Orleans tomorrow to speak at the nurse power brunch. That's where I will be this this weekend with some 300 incredible nurses. And I can't wait to talk about some of what we talked about. Yeah, they will make sure to.

Bryan Doerries

Meet us now.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Yes. Yes. Maybe among them are the nurses, nurse leaders who need to step up now.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah. Yep. Oh, I'll be looking for them. Don't think I won't mind you.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

We'll look forward to hearing. Hearing more.

Cara Lunsford

Sounds good. All right.

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Take care. Bye bye. Bye, love.

Cara Lunsford

I know if you are 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. Nurse dot is a nurse dot com original podcast series Production music and sound Editing by Dawn Lunsford, Production Coordination by Rhea Wade, Additional editing by John Wells. Thank you to all the listeners for tuning in to the Nurse Dot podcast.

Until next time, keep spreading the love and the care.