11. Jenn Johnson

Jenn Johnson, ER nurse, mom of two, entrepreneur, researcher, and author, takes us into her world—18 years of emergency nursing (with a few detours into peds and PACU), and the moment mid-pandemic when the collective trauma of the life-or-death days broke her open and became the book Nursing Intuition: How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity, and Survive Your Career.We talk about what it actually looks like inside a Canadian ER at capacity—boarders, gridlock, hallway nursing, and the chaos. We get into interoception, the "eighth sense," and why nurses who can spot a crashing patient from a mile away somehow forget how to listen to their own bodies. Jenn walks us through the patient who changed everything—the one where her gut said something was wrong five years before any doctor validated her—and what it finally took to trust that voice instead of talking herself out of it. We talk about the word that stops a doctor in their tracks, why "advocating" shows up differently in a chart than a feeling does, and how she's transformed her own face-first entrance into nursing into an international study on new grad nurse retention—because you don't need a master's degree to give back to your profession.We also go somewhere heavier: nurse bullying and the "nurses eat their young" culture that still gets treated as a rite of passage instead of a crisis, acclimating to the "nuts," why sleep isn't optional recovery but the body's actual repair process, and the grief nurses carry for patients they never got permission to mourn. Jenn teaches a workshop with Nurse Blake at nursing camp (and soon, the cruise) called How to Grieve Your Patient—and she walks us through the same visualization exercise that's left every class she's taught in tears.If you've ever known something was wrong before you could prove it, been made to feel small by someone who was supposed to have your back, needed permission to grieve, rest, or trust the thing your body already knew, or you're just here for a real conversation with a nurse who says the quiet part out loud—this one's for you.Find Jenn on:Instagram: @ernurse.jennTikTok: @ernurse.jennLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-johnson-bscn-rn/Add Jenn's book to your reading list, Nursing Intuition: How to Trust Your Gut, Save Your Sanity, and Survive Your Career: https://www.amazon.com/Nursing-Intuition-Sanity-Survive-Career-ebook/dp/B0DB5VWFFY