Krista Parsons is a nurse and author, originally from Newfoundland and now living in Grande Prairie, Alberta. She went back to school to become a nurse in her late twenties with five kids ten and under at home, after years at her father’s side through diabetes and dialysis. She graduated in 2014 and worked a surgical floor until a car rear-ended her on the way to a shift in 2018. Back surgery followed, and so did the words she will never forget: she could no longer go back to bedside nursing. This conversation is about what a nurse sees from the other side of the curtain.
A few moments from behind the scenes:
She found us.
Krista reached out to me, not the other way around. Near the end she laughed that I was probably thinking, “Who is this woman? What is she doing?” She is also only our second guest from Canada, which made me happy.
The apology call.
Minutes after she was rear-ended, Krista’s second phone call, right after her husband, was to the nurse she was supposed to relieve. She was injured, and she was apologizing for running late. Anyone who works shifts will recognize that instinct.
No announcements.
When Krista is a patient, she doesn’t tell people she is a nurse. “I like to be respectful and let people do their job.” That makes what happened next even harder to hear.
The minibag.
After the medication mix-up, Krista asked for her morphine in a minibag so she wouldn’t get another needle. Then she heard her nurse in the hallway asking a colleague how to do it. She called her husband and told him she was going home that day.
The story at the heart of the episode
Krista was admitted for back surgery to the same floor she had worked on. She knew the routine, and things didn’t line up from the start: her bed was the farthest from the washroom, and the post-op equipment wasn’t there. After surgery, she rang for pain medicine for hours while she watched her roommate get a bed bath and warm blankets.
Around six in the morning, a nurse she had worked with came in with her last dose of antibiotic. Krista woke up, looked at the syringe, and knew it was wrong. The nurse insisted it was what “they” had given her to give. Krista took it out of her hand: “That is ceftriaxone, that is not Ancef, and you’re not giving me that medication.” A few minutes later the nurse came back. “Yeah, you were right.”
As a nurse, Krista understands how it happens: end of a long night, a heavy floor, shift change coming. “But as a patient, it is terrifying.” What stayed with her most was the woman in the next bed, who would never have known the difference.
Why this is the human side of medicine
Krista says that as care providers, we tend to tie our worth to our productivity. When she was told she couldn’t do the job anymore, her first question was, what now? Her answer became her book, When the Healer Breaks, and the AND STILL… Movement, a space where people living through life-altering change can feel seen and heard, without toxic positivity.
Her advice to her younger self: be brave, be bold, and advocate for yourself early. Her advice to us: stop looking at the screen and look at the patient. She even told a story about being booked for a CT with contrast she is allergic to, an allergy that sits in her chart, which nobody caught until she asked.
And when she thinks back on all the times she has been anxious in a hospital bed, it isn’t the technology she remembers. “It’s that human touch, that pat on the shoulder or the little rub on the arm.” Everything’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.
Learn more about Krista’s book at whenthehealerbreaks.com and the movement at andstillmovement.com.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts.