Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Nguyen.
Lisa, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My name is Lisa Nguyen and I am a second-generation Vietnamese American, San Diego native and a Cleveland, OH transplant. I lived in the City Heights neighborhood a good chunk of my life. Born and raised to parents who are Vietnamese (Boat People) refugees, I learned from an early age, the importance of family, culture, hard work, and humility. Each goal that I have accomplished has reminded me how humbling this growth journey is.
Today, I am a critical care nurse and sexual assault nurse examiner. I knew I wanted to be a nurse when I was a hospice volunteer in high school and that experience has shaped how I thought nursing care should be – compassionate and holistic. Getting into nursing school was not easy for me, as I will explain later, and I moved to Cleveland, OH to pursue my dreams of becoming a nurse.
Originally, I wanted to be a hospice or oncology nurse as influenced by experience as a hospice volunteer. However, when I worked on a trauma progressive care unit as a nursing assistant, I had a nurse told me that I had the brains to work in a more complex and acute field like critical care and nurse anesthesia. Her words for some reason never left me. When I completed my critical care rotation in nursing school, I realized that I found my real love and have been a critical care nurse for the past five years.
Three years into nursing though, I realized that I wanted to do more with my nursing career and wanted to find other avenues to become a stronger patient advocate. At that time, I went back to school for my acute care nurse practitioner. I was also influenced by the #MeToo movement and become a sexual assault nurse examiner/forensic nurse to help others who have been victimized by violence.
I also found my voice in getting involved with politics. Whether it’s lobbying for nurses rights at the bedside or becoming a central committee member for my community in Ohio, I believe that nursing has made me a better advocate for my patients and others in my life.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My road to becoming a nurse was anything but smooth. In fact, I was rejected from nursing school twenty times before a program out in Ohio accepted me into an entry-level master’s in nursing program. It probably took me a total of four years to get into nursing school because I was honestly not the best student. Even to this day, I find myself struggling in graduate school. I took a two-year break from my nurse practitioner program after failing my advance pharmacology class.
During that time, I hone in on my bedside critical care nurse skills and obtain my certification as a critical care nurse (CCRN). I enrolled back into my nurse practitioner program last semester and I am now one class away from graduation. Being a bedside nurse also had it’s challenges too – workplace bullying during my first year as a nurse, unsupportive management in toxic workplace environment, short-staffing, and frequent burn-out.
The more season of a nurse I become, the more I realized that taking care of yourself is the number one priority. For those who want to become a nurse or some kind of healthcare professional, self-care is very important. The thing is, we are naturally healer and we want to take care of everybody in our lives – our family, friends, boyfriends, patients, etc. In the end, we put ourselves last and forget to take care of our own being. With that mentality however, we are more prone to getting burn out, depress, lose our effectiveness as a caregiver for those around us. I use to think that only hard work was what made me productive. However, I now realized that what actually makes me productive is 60% hard work and the other 40% is self-care; that includes exercise, healthy eating, sleep, and having time off to recharge.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I’ve been a critical care nurse for five years, a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) for two years, and a community leader for two years. As a critical care nurse, I mainly work in a medical intensive care unit at a county hospital/level-1 trauma center. We take care of patients who are in acute respiratory distress syndrome and other pulmonary diseases requiring mechanical ventilation. We also take care of patients in multi-organ failure, sepsis, and patients experiencing gastrointestinal bleeding.
I work as a SANE nurse for two different hospital systems in Cleveland, OH. As mentioned earlier, I see patients who have been victimized by violence, which includes sexual assault, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, felonious assaults, child abuse, and elder abuse. This is a very unique work for me because I deal with people from all walks of life – adults, children, homeless, disable, LGBTQ, asylum seekers, etc. and all of them experience the same type of trauma.
What I’m most proud of as a service provider is being able to help those during the worst moments of their life. My career and journey have been built on humility and being able to help others during traumatic times has been a driving force for me as an advocate beyond the bedside.
Were there people and/or experiences you had in your childhood that you feel laid the foundation for your success?
I am a second-generation Vietnamese-American. I was born to parents who were immigrants and refugees of the Vietnam War. I always felt that being children of immigrants, we learn how to be resilient at an earlier age. Knowing that my parents left their native country and came to American with nothing but the clothes on their backs has become the driving force to built and fortify my work ethics so that their sacrifices are not in vain.
Contact Info:
- Email: ldnguyen225@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/fencernurse
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