On November 1, I interviewed Sally Currence, a RN LTSS Service Coordinator who is a close friend to my family. As a single mom of two children, Sally graduated from nursing school at the top of her class in 2007, right after she had her first child. She first received her LPN then her associates in RN. Sally was always interested in a health career but did not know if that’s what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. What really inspired her to get a position as an RN and go to nursing school was her Aunt and her Uncle; her Aunt is an RN on an oncology unit and her Uncle is a hematologist oncologist in Virginia Beach. Sally’s Aunt was able to get her secretary position in the same hospital that Sally’s aunt and uncle worked in. At the job, she was able to work and shadow her aunt around the halls. After working at the hospital, Sally knew being a nurse was something she wanted to do for the rest of her life. The hospital experience she had with her aunt led her to jobs in other units as her career went on. She continued to work in a hospital setting in different units such as med-surg, telemetry, ER, ICU, and hospice care. After working in different units, Sally’s job within homecare led her to case management from home health.  Sally found herself loving home health and that environment. For 13 years, she worked off and on within home health and found it was hard to manage her time between her work and her two kids. When on-call got too much, she joined a program called Anthem and started case management of groups of people within their homes. This way she is able to spend more time with her kids and she does not work on the weekends or full time. she stated, “It’s almost like halfway nursing– you get the experience but do not work full time as a nurse would.” Sally went on to explain the different roles her job has and what she does. “Some of the basic roles I have is routine assessments of health conditions within the home and I take care of health services. This means I make sure there is safety in the home every 6 months, that there are facilitating providers to each hall, and that every aid is taking care of their patients. It is kind of a stressful job making sure people do their part, but I enjoy it. The job is more on the back end of nursing but I love helping others.” Sally’s favorite part of the job is being able to meet and access the needs of others; she knows her job is important and that by doing what she is doing, she helps keeps patients out of the emergency room. She stated that the most surprising aspect of her job was how hard she worked to get to where she is today. She stated, “ In 2007, I only had a week off when I gave birth to my first son. After that, I had to continue to work, be a student, and now be a mom all at the same time; it was hard. For a full year, I had no breaks and ended up graduating at the top of my class, I was so surprised and was not expecting that at all.” Sally went on and said the most challenging part of her job was learning how to deal with people who are not compliant; she had to teach patients to want to take care of themselves when patients should already want the the not to go back to the hospital. She admits it is still hard today to deal with some patients, especially if they do not have the same mentality as she does. At the end of the interview, some advice she gave me was to stay strong and no matter how hard the work got to continue to work through it. She said, “Anyone can honestly be a nurse, but it depends on how much heart you have when it starts to get tough. And that isn’t even the worst part! Just do not forget that you’re learning to have the ability to save people’s lives, and how important your job really is within this world.”