Johanna Verburg, DNP, CRNP, NP-C

Since entering healthcare as a young nursing student, more than 20 years ago, I never did things in the normal nor traditional manner.  Healthcare was something I practiced where I was and not merely something I clocked in to provide. From the beginning, my choices in how I practiced my own healthcare and how I helped others was different. I questioned the status quo and tried complimentary and alternative methods first and often instead of the established method. Yet I also sought evidence to those practices even the most alternative. Evidence based does not merely mean one answer.  

Many, many moons ago, it all began with a decision to transfer from one of the Top 20 Research Universities in the US to a state community college, to leave Social Sciences and pursue a basic associates degree in Nursing, to become a RN.  

The meandering path of education was followed through a decade of practicing in the community while raising a family.

And then came Micah-man who changed me, who made me who I would become, and reminded me that I was never supposed to stop pursuing those dreams, no matter what life brought.

My second act was to follow the advice my father had taught my entire life, to always be the best you can be.  Returning to the traditional path meant pursuing Bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Nursing, with membership to Alpha Kappa Delta, Alpha Phi Sigma, and Sigma Theta Tau International.

Finally, I graduated with honors from the birthplace of Nurse Miswifery and Family Nurse Practice in the US, Frontier Nursing University.  In the shadow of the mountains of my childhood and her life’s opus, Mary Breckinridge‘s legacy of focusing on marginalized, unreached and non-mainstream patient populations lives on in her school which requires you learn to reach the patients who need you the most, and to know evidence based alternative practices as surely as you must learn the traditional and mainstream as well.  I earned my MSN in Family Nurse Practice and finally my DNP, an achievement less than 2% of nurses obtain in our lifetimes.