As of this month, I have been a public health nurse for forty-two years. Public Health nursing rocks. It requires compassion and a heart for advocacy and activism, as its foremothers and founders demonstrated. Here are images of a younger me at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation when I was working as a nurse practitioner at Baltimore’s Chase-Brexton Clinic. And me in 1982 in my first job as Hypertension Control Nurse with the Richmond Health Department and the Richmond Urban League. Taking the blood pressure of then mayor of Richmond, Dr. Roy West and shaking the hand of then governor of Virginia, Charles Robb when he declared a hypertension awareness month.
I love public health nursing and everywhere in this world it has taken me. No regrets on my career choice.