Always a nurse, or so the saying goes. Events of the past year, and especially of the last week, have taught me the truth of that saying, at least on a personal level.

I am and have been over the course of my 39-year career (counting from when I first started nursing school), a public health nurse (TB and hypertension control nurse with the health department in Richmond, Virginia), an inpatient stroke/neuro ward nurse, a rehabilitation nurse, an HIV/AIDS nurse at an LGBTQ community clinic, a Health Care for the Homeless nurse and family nurse practitioner. I have been (still am) a nurse researcher, a nursing professor, and a writer who happens to be a nurse. Always a somewhat skeptical/critically-thinking nurse (still am), questioning our healthcare system, our profession of nursing, and our socio-political system as a country.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic became a reality over a year ago, like many people throughout the world, I have reassessed my professional roles. What’s essential and what’s not? Essential: teaching population health and health policy as well as possible to our future nurses; becoming even more politically engaged to speak up on important issues like racism in health care, gender-based violence, and hate crimes against LGBTQ people/people living homeless/Asian-Americans; growing my network of politically engaged, progressive nurses across the country; spreading evidence-based public health information about the pandemic/pushing back against the cacophony of mis-information and outright lies; thinking and acting like a public health nurse, which I have realized is the kind of nurse I have always been. Not essential: university internal politics; worry about being productive with the usual expectations of grant-writing and peer-reviewed journal writing. My pandemic mantra has and continues to be: accomplish less, experience more.

This past week, the day after my two-week post second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine dose, I began volunteer work as a COVID-19 vaccinator at a local public hospital. I asked for and received an excellent nurse practitioner mentor to shadow at first to get up to speed on the proper vaccination protocol, then sat down at my assigned station and began talking with patients and giving them the vaccinations. Yesterday, the vaccination clinic nurse supervisor introduced herself (both of us behind masks, of course) as one of my public/population health students years ago. She said she is an acute care nurse who has been working on the frontlines of the pandemic “since day one.” I thanked her for her work as a hospital nurse and as a nurse supervisor for the vaccine clinic, and gently reminded her that she is doing vital public/population health nursing.

I told my husband and family members (all, except my two-year-old granddaughter vaccinated now), that working as a volunteer public health nurse at the COVID-19 vaccination clinic feels like the most important and personally satisfying work I have done in my entire nursing career. Spread the word: These vaccines save lives and livelihoods. They give us hope.

(Please note: the photograph here was ‘staged’ and contains no patient or provider information.)