#73 Amy the Good Nurse: Taking Down America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer

Sarah Lavonne: Hi. I’m Sarah Lavonne, and I’m so glad you’re here. Here at Bundle Birth, we believe that your life has the potential to make a deep, meaningful impact on the world around you. You as a nurse have the ability to add value to every person and patient you touch. We want to inspire you with the resources, education, and stories to support you to live your absolute best life, both in and outside of work. Don’t expect perfection over here. We’re just here to have some conversations about anything birth, work, and life, trying to add some happy to your hour as we all grow together. By nurses, for nurses, this is Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses.
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The nursing world is very small. We all know this. Particularly in OB, we know that once one nurse, you go to another hospital and, oh, this nurse and travel nurse is here. We all are very much connected through various things. If we take it one step beyond OB nursing, nursing, in general, is also a small world. We have lots of commonalities, and we have lots of things that connect us no matter where we’re at.
I had gone to a charity event by the Lemons Foundation and had ended up there with a bunch of nurses. It’s always so interesting to be in an environment around nurses outside of the OB specialty because, for me, most of the nursing things that I do are very much L&D-centric, or at least perinatal-centric. I met Amy at this event and just heard her story. I actually knew about her story but didn’t make the connection. Do you remember we were at the bar and I said hello to you and I was like, “Hi, I’m Sarah.” You’re like, “I’m Amy.” I was like, “Okay,” but it didn’t click for me.
Eventually, then she’s up on stage and they were honoring you for your contributions to the well-being of our specialty. We’ll get into that story. You have the wildest story ever. I was like, “Oh my God, I met her. That’s her.” I had seen the movie. I think I’d seen the documentary.
Amy Loughren: Oh, the movie.
Sarah: I watched it again. Of course, I saw the movie. Anything nursing, we’re going to watch the movie. We’ll link all of those links down below. Here’s your teaser. If you don’t know who Amy is, Amy is known as Amy the Good Nurse. She will explain to you why she got that title. I think your story in general, while yes, it’s in the ICU, I think that we all can relate because we can see that this potentially could happen anywhere.
Welcome to Bundle Birth Nurses and our community. We are so excited to have you. I would love for you to just introduce yourself and then we got to get into your story. For those that have not heard it, you can hear it more in detail. Again, we’ll link everything in the show notes down below. We want to hear the nitty-gritty from you of what did you get yourself into.
Amy: I was working as a travel nurse back in 2003. Actually, I’ve been working as a travel nurse for a couple of years. I met this amazing nurse, absolutely amazing nurse. He ended up becoming one of my closest friends. As you know, all of the trauma bonding that happens as co-workers [inaudible 00:03:39] my social life ended up being the people I worked with. Everything that was happening outside of work did come into work. I was so happy that I had someone that I could talk to and I could laugh with and yet I respected him beyond belief.
Back in the day, back in 2003, we still used books. We weren’t looking up on computers what medications we’re doing. He was just an encyclopedia of information.
Sarah: Interesting. Okay.
Amy: We were working in the ICU, so we did code after code after code. We had a very sick ICU, but the sicknesses tended to be not as bad as what you would imagine would end up in a code. A very long story short, my best friend ended up being fired. The only explanation that I had was he had lied on his résumé and did not disclose he had been fired from a previous job, which sounded like absolute BS and didn’t make sense. He was the best nurse that I had worked with and he was being fired.
About two weeks after he was fired, the police showed up at the hospital. When the police showed up and the detective showed up, they were not only asking questions about him, but they were also asking questions about me.
Sarah: That is so stressful.
Amy: Yes. It was extremely stressful, not to mention the fact that I was a travel nurse. I was traveling from upstate New York, three and a half hours to this hospital. I also had, at that point, a pre-existing condition and I had electrical cardiomyopathy, so I could not lose my job because I would lose my insurance and I wouldn’t be able to get it back. I also was a single parent.
Here I was thrust into the middle of an investigation about my best friend and it was revealed to me through these detectives that my friend, Charles Cullen, who ended up being the most prolific serial killer in American history, who had murdered between 400 and 1,000 patients, I ended up being thrust into the middle of this investigation to get him behind bars and the hospital was shredding evidence. Not only was I working undercover for the prosecution to be talking to my best friend on recorded lines and wearing wires, but I was also smuggling information out of the hospital for the detectives because the hospital was not forthcoming in their information. They were shredding everything.
Sarah: Okay, wait, hold on, because I’m thinking, first of all, they were investigating you, how did you get off the hook is my first question.
Amy: The interesting part of that is when I first heard that they were asking questions about my friend, Charlie, the detectives were also asking questions about me. At first, my understanding was they were trying to get information about me when in reality what they were doing was trying to understand why. They already had his name. They already knew that he was the killer, even though the hospital had given them a different name to throw them off the case.
Sarah: They gave it you?
Amy: They came at another, actually a phlebotomist that the hospital– The hospital knew that Charles Cullen had been murdering people. They knew–
Sarah: For how long?
Amy: For about eight months.
Sarah: He was still employed there.
Amy: They did not get rid of him. They did not fire him. They left him on the floor. From the time they knew, there is an understanding that he murdered at least eight more people after they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was him that was murdering people. Now they’re trying to cover everything up so the detectives don’t know. My understanding was that they were asking a lot of questions about me because people were telling them that I was his best friend.
Sarah: Yes. In theory, co-conspirator potentially.
Amy: Yes. Yes. Yes. That ended pretty quickly when they realized– It didn’t take them long to understand that there was just no way. It was absolutely that I had no idea. There’s a lot of guilt that goes along with that. There is a movie that is based on the book by Charles Graeber, who wrote about Charles Cullen. I am in a very small part of the book, which they did make into a movie. In the movie, it looks as if I had discovered he was murdering people at the time I was working with him, and that’s not the truth. That was just Hollywood fodder.
I actually found out from the detectives who shared undercover information with me, shared some documentation with me, and evidence with me that I then learned that he was a serial killer. I did not know when I was working with him. Unfortunately, there were multiple times where he actually murdered people in front of me, and I did not see it. I did not see it.
Sarah: Of course, because you believe the best in people. No one’s thinking that someone’s murdering somebody in front of you. That’s like a freaking movie, and it is now.
Amy: It is now. It’s a movie. In the movie, there were a lot of times where I was so against what the movie was portraying because it did look like I really was aware and that I was pushing back on being a part of the investigation. I was never, never concerned about being a part of the investigation. I was all in. The second they showed me evidence, I was like, “What can we do?”
Even though I still had really intense feelings for this person as my best friend, and because he was such a good friend, I did have those weird dichotomous feelings of am I right. Am I going against my friend and I’m lying to my friend and I’m believing the detectives? I had all of that, conflicting feelings. It was all the feels of terror of what am I in the middle of. Can I trust the detectives? Am I really going against someone that maybe they’re framing? I don’t know.
Sarah: What pushed you over the edge to actually, I’m going to say side with the detectives and the legal system versus your hospital when you have all those additional layers of being a single parent and needing the insurance and all of that? What pushed you over?
Amy: When the detectives came to my home, they brought all of the evidence they had. I asked them, where are the electrical medical records? Where are the electronic medical records, the EMRs? They said, what are EMRs? I realized that the hospital had not shared with them any of the medical records that would have shown the timestamps of when he went into a patient’s chart, the timestamps of whether he was looking at people’s labs, the timestamps of how many patients he was actually looking up at the time. It was also going to show what his documentation was like.
The hospital had not revealed any of that to them, hoping that they would not realize that the EMRs were even a thing. It was within those moments, I realized– I was definitely at that moment of the hospital is really the monster in this situation. I’ve also understood since this time, there were five hospitals that knew he was murdering people. They knew without a doubt he was harming people, murdering people, and they sent him to the next hospital. Somerset Medical Center where I worked was the last hospital he worked at. My hospital was trying to pass him off onto the next hospital as well.
Sarah: I know. You saw this and you’re saying, we have obviously the serial killer on our hands and then we also have the criminal of the hospital that’s allowing it. They’re the co-conspirator really. Then you said to yourself, I just have to do the right thing, or what? What gave you the courage, I think too, because also where we’re going with this, those that are listening, is how do we stand up to the beast of the system and do the right thing because I think we can all look at this, especially now, after all is said and done, years later, it was the right thing.
I look at you and I’m like, “It had to have been the most courageous thing to–” When you’re now looking back, of course, hindsight’s 20-20, you’re on the other side. You’re like, I am safe, I am healthy. I assume you have insurance, you’re living as a result. To go through that in the moment is very different when there’s so much coming at you and so much emotion and you’re dealing with the fact that this is your best friend, that now you’re like being slapped in the face with it’s not who I thought I was. It had to have taken the most insane amount of courage. Ultimately, how did you muster that up? Where did that come from? What was the resolve for you?
Amy: The interesting side of this was I was also in a situation with my 11-year-old daughter who was painfully shy and I was also directing the sixth-grade play. My daughter was all of a sudden thrust into this amazing feeling of being the popular girl because her mother was directing the sixth-grade play. We had all of these kids over at the house all the time. When I realized everything that was happening, I also realized that at that point, there was a name out there already. Charles Cullen’s name was out there and he was actually being covered by the paparazzi and the local newspapers.
There was a moment that gave me pause when the detectives asked me if I would help. At first, I said, yes, and then I realized this is not just about me, this is about a family. I went to my 11-year-old daughter and I said, this is what looks like is happening. It looks like one of my coworkers is harming patients. I have an opportunity to help perhaps stop that. This looks like possibly someone may think that I’m a part of this. I cannot tell anyone. I am working undercover. No one will know. I could possibly be in the newspaper. We lived in a small town. Someone could see that perhaps I was colluding with a serial killer and take it the wrong way. I could never tell anyone I was working undercover.
The way that I presented it to my 11-year-old, she said, “Wait, he could be murdering people?” I said, “Yes, but if I do this, we may end up having to move. You won’t have these friends anymore. We won’t have this house. There could be worst-case scenario, these things could happen.” It was my 11-year-old that said, “Wait, he’s murdering people? Why wouldn’t we do this? Why wouldn’t we help the police?” It didn’t even make sense to her that I was having a conversation about what if. I realized that that 11-year-old had a greater moral compass than all of those hospital administrators.
I thought, this is so basic. Of course, why wouldn’t I? There is nothing else more important at this moment but to make sure that this person never harms another patient. If I have the power to do that, why wouldn’t I do that, even if it means perhaps putting myself in harm’s way?
Sarah: For me, this begs the question, how strong is my moral compass? What would I do in that scenario? One of my mantras is do the right thing. When I’m faced with questions of that or a this or that decision, frequently what it comes down to is, what if I just did the right thing? I think the right thing for all of us listening, I hope you never face a situation where your best friend is a serial killer, but whether it be big like that or small, for me, the challenge already is to really think about doing the right thing.
Sometimes doing the right thing is really, really challenging and has implications for our lives where it could mean a lost job. That to me also becomes this value proposition of what’s more important to me, doing the right thing and my integrity or my job?
Amy: Yes. This is not unique in the fact that, okay, maybe it’s not a serial killer, but every single day in nursing, we see things that are right on that cusp of, is this the right thing? Are we doing the right thing? Is this person treating the patient the way that we believe they should be treated? Is the doctor actually making the right decision? Are we not speaking up because we are worried about the repercussions?
The fact is we live and work in a system that does not support the people who speak up. In fact, it punishes the people who speak up. We cannot rock the system. We are in this constant moral distress of these are the right things to do. Sometimes we do it undercover ourselves. We know the right thing to do. We do it without telling the doctor. We do it without telling our supervisor. We do it because it goes along with our morals. Professionally, we are putting ourselves at risk at all times because we know that it could truly take our job away from us and our profession.
Sarah: No wonder you wonder why we have a nursing shortage and nurses aren’t lasting as long at the bedside because we’re in a system where, extreme, you’re covering up this mass murderer. Myself, I’m no longer working in a system because of a lot of those issues as well. Again, let me be clear, that’s not the answer for everyone.
Amy: Of course.
Sarah: We’re not trying to have you leave the system. What advice do you have for us, if any, as an example for our profession of doing the right thing, of being courageous, and of fighting for what is right? What ended up happening in the aftermath? You wore the wires, what happened? You worked with the detectives, what’s the rest of the story?
Amy: No one could know that I had worked with the New Jersey prosecution and the detectives. No one could know. I had to go back to work because I needed my insurance. He was arrested and I was able to get a confession out of him, which meant that he was going to prison for the rest of his life or the death penalty. With that confession, I could never tell anyone that it was me.
I had to go back to work with all of the nurses who were scared to work with me because I was best friends with Charles Cullen. Also, the hospital was very afraid of me because they did know that I had something to do with the investigation. They did know that I was a huge part of what put him behind bars, so they couldn’t touch me.
Sarah: How did they know that?
Amy: This part of it is a little nuanced story, but essentially, when I wore a wire, I had a confession from him and the wire malfunctioned. They took him into custody and there was– Essentially it would have been my word against his. They needed a full confession. They had to call my supervisors two days later while I was working and pull me off of the floor to go to the prosecution’s offices where they brought him in shackled and brought him into a room so that I could talk to him and get a full confession out of him, so the hospital knew that I was involved.
Sarah: They didn’t know the extent, that you were stealing medical records and wearing wires, all of that. Holy moly.
Amy: No. They didn’t know that until Charles Graeber’s book came out.
Sarah: Which was how much later?
Amy: The book came out in 2013. It happened in 2003 and the book came out in 2013. The only reason that the book came out was because all of the civil suits were completed. We weren’t really worried about being sued at that point and we weren’t really worried about the investigation being turned around because I was a confidential informant. I had to go back to work with all of the gossip and people afraid to work with me. It was very, very challenging. It was very challenging.
Sarah: You held that secret for 10 years.
Amy: I held that secret for 10 years, I did.
Sarah: Let’s talk about your experience and the aftermath of that because I can imagine the potential– I’m going to use the word trauma, but I take that word very seriously. You can define your experience. What was the impact on you and your psyche as a result of all of this? Did you feel empowered or were you constantly fearful? What was that? What happened in your brain?
Amy: Immediately after, I think I went into complete and utter denial. I wanted to just distance myself emotionally from it. I definitely went into a mental health crisis from understanding he had murdered so many people and knowing that he had murdered people right in front of me and I could have stopped him at that moment. There was one particular scenario where I actually spoke for him and took responsibility for a decision he had made, which was actually something that ended up killing that person, murdering the person.
I did a lot of self-loathing of why did I not see this. What is wrong with me? Also that I pulled in a best friend that was a serial killer, what is wrong with me that I would have befriended a serial killer? I struggled for a while, for a couple of years, mentally, as far as my mental health and emotionally. Then I decided to start healing myself and went to modalities of healing and learning about self-healing, learning about self-forgiveness, and learning about being focused on the understanding that it was a role that we played.
Both of us were in that together and giving myself a little bit of credit for the fact that I did stop him and also making sure that every single day I said at least some type of blessing towards the victims and the victims’ families and used that as my meditation to say I’m sorry, I’m sorry that I didn’t see it sooner, but I did finally get to a point where I realized I stopped him from murdering more people, and I do believe that.
Sarah: How long did that take you?
Amy: I would say a couple of years, I really struggled, and then when I really started to delve into the spiritual aspect of life and really focusing on my Buddhism, focusing on healing practices, focusing on yoga, meditation, Reiki, things that I went all in on discovering all types of modalities to help not only heal myself, but make sense of what had happened and why this situation had been so dark and understanding that being in that dark was what brought such beautiful light. There were so many beautiful things that came out of this, so many beautiful things.
Sarah: What I’m hearing is this desperation. That is the case with any kind of hard thing, whether considered traumatic or not. There’s post-traumatic growth as always an opportunity, but it does take this certain level of self-motivation to say, I can’t live like this forever, I’ve got to do something else. That takes effort. I think for all of us that are feeling morally injured or depressed or feeling like you’re living in a system that is so far, internally, almost like your body resists so much of what you’re seeing, it’s like, instead of changing the system, again, let me say, I am here and we are doing it, but it is baby steps and it is not all at once and this is a beast of a system.
We want to work with the system because I truly believe that there are good individuals in a part of a system that has some issues, right? We can see that across all specialties. In order to live and survive in that, rather than give up on yourself and give up on a job that we love, it’s like instead of expecting someone else to do it for you, it sounds like you found ways to heal yourself and to reach outside of your profession or of other people to internally do the work to heal.
Amy: Yes. What you’re saying is so true, that there are beautiful people in this profession. I don’t believe we’re going to be able to change the system. I don’t. I think that it is broken. I think that literally the only thing that we can do is take care of our own morals, take care of what we are doing as individuals, surrounding ourselves in our professions with those people that are aligned with us and are like-minded, and to reject those people because we know those people that we work with that are making decisions about patient’s care that are not in alignment with the way that we would do things and how we would want someone to be treated.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to truly change that. The only thing that we can do is build up that alignment with those people who are like-minded.
Sarah: Yes. I think of those like-minded people, it’s like the more like-minded people we get in our profession that have a moral compass and that are focused on patient safety and mental health and their experience and in doing the right thing and of putting our own egos aside, the more that some of those changes can happen. You’re right. Especially us little L&D nurses, we’re not talking about an L&D hospital. We’re talking about a L&D unit or an ICU unit, not the whole hospital system of levels of people where L&D is like we’re little ants on the side that we hold babies all day. They don’t actually know what we deal with.
One of the stories we tell and it’s come up many times in the podcast this season is the story of the starfish. Do you know this? I don’t know [crosstalk]–
Amy: No. Enlighten me.
Sarah: I don’t think it’s a real story. Basically, the story is, and I’m sorry for those that have heard it a million times, but keep it in mind because it comes up for my life all the time. The idea is that this grandpa and grandson walk on the beach and they come around this bend and they come across this beach full of starfish, layers high where they can barely walk. There’s thousands and thousands of starfish.
The little kid reaches down and grabs a starfish and throws it back in the water. The grandpa says to the grandson, that’s adorable of you, but what do you think you’re doing? Look around. There’s thousands of starfish on the beach. He reaches down and grabs another one and throws it back in the water and says, it matters for that one. The idea is, and where that has turned out for me– It’s now a business concept, to be honest. Our Motion app icon is a starfish. You’ll see starfish on everything that we do with the idea that the difference you can make is in that one patient in front of you.
If there are thousands of us walking on the beach together of the problem and we all decide to put our effort towards doing the right thing and throwing the starfish back in the water, we can make a difference. Does that mean that the next wave that rushes up doesn’t bring another thousand starfish? That can feel extremely discouraging, but it’s like when you’re looking at the problem, it can feel really overwhelming and like, “What difference can I make? I’m not going to do anything,” versus what you did or what our nurses are doing of reaching down and saying, “You know what? It matters for this one, so I’m going to show up to work and I’m going to apply myself where it matters here.”
It may feel small, but ultimately that big impact when you’re not alone in the problem, then together we are making a difference. Now, I agree. Are we going to come alongside and change the entire hospital system? No, we’re not. I don’t have hope for that. I have a lot of hope, but I’m also realistic about my expectations.
Easily for you, it’s you were presented with what was in front of you and you were offered this opportunity to help and do the right thing and say, I may have missed a couple of starfish without even realizing it– I’m really expanding on this analogy– but also right now I’m being offered a crane to potentially throw potentially thousands more patients back in the water by saving their lives from this person. I might have to learn how to operate the crane and I might need to be a little uncomfortable, I might have to sweat and I may not have the muscle power for it, but I’m going to muster it up and do the right thing on this beach. I really took that analogy. I hope you’re tracking.
Amy: That’s beautiful and yes, you’re right. I was focused on the starfish I wasn’t able to help or that I didn’t know and I didn’t see them. That is beautiful. That is beautiful. Thank you for sharing that story.
Sarah: One last quick question. I’m thinking about just outside of the whole hospital network and I’m curious for you how you reconciled with the betrayal of your best friend. I think in my personal life, in the last 10 years, I’ve lost friendships over various things. I think for me, I look back and I’m like, okay, it’s like life was protecting me from various things or now I can reconcile with that. In the moment to be best friends with someone and have shared your intimate moments with and opened up to and trusted to find out they are not at all who you thought they were, I’m sure disappointing is the biggest understatement of your life.
I’ve never been through that, but I can imagine that that was really overwhelming. How was that experience for you on a friendship level? How did you reconcile?
Amy: What a great question. I remember the day when he confessed to me, we were sitting side by side in this room that was filled with cameras and recording devices. He was sitting next to me. He never wore scrubs. He didn’t like scrubs and here he was in his prison uniform. They were scrubs. I noticed he had a huge scar on his left arm. That scar what I found out and I asked him, “How did you get that scar?” He said, “I really haven’t succeeded at much in life including being able to kill myself.”
In that moment I thought of him as this soul. I didn’t see him anymore as this human who had done all of these terrible things. I saw him as this very mentally ill soul who had not been cared for, had not had the help that he had deserved for his mental state. I took my sweater off and I put my sweater around him to cover up that scar because I know that he had hidden that from me as a friend and it didn’t matter to me in that moment whether his friendship was real or if he was the murderer or if he was someone that I couldn’t recognize.
What I knew is that I had trusted him and I had been close to someone who needed me as well and that friendships are complicated, granted they’re not serial killer friendships, but I understood the idea of true unconditional love and true unconditional friendship. He confessed to me that day not because there was a detective that was there essentially berating him. He confessed to me because I loved him.
I realized over the years I trust more. I trust people more because it doesn’t matter whether I recognize whether they have ill intent. What I’ve realized is that I recognize their beauty and I recognize the light in them and I recognize their soul, so I’m more open and I’m more trusting because of that situation. I’m more loving and I’m more understanding. He gave me that gift. That was where I reconciled that. That is where things changed for me is the realization every person has light in them.
Sarah: I think that’s so beautiful and so important. For us, again, most of us not coming across serial killers but so quickly we’re defined by our bad decisions. [crosstalk] people off.
Amy: Right?
Sarah: Yes.
Amy: We’re complicated. We are complicated.
Sarah: While we may need to still set boundaries in our relationships.
Amy: Boundaries are helping. That does not mean that I picnic with people who are serial killers. It just means to have that takeaway of they played a role. They played a beautiful role and they don’t necessarily need to be in my life.
Sarah: It’s not all or nothing. It’s like you can hold space for both. The fact that this relationship is not what it used to be and you made really, really terrible choices, and yet that doesn’t make every ounce of who you are a horrible person. Very quickly, we are so quick to judge and define by those terrible decisions instead of being able to also hold space for the beauty in other people.
The other thing we say a lot and we do a lot of trauma-informed care work and classes and everything we do we try to be very trauma-informed and teach that. One of the phrases that I think is a Penny Simkin that she says that we don’t know why but I’m sure they have a good reason for it. That gives this element of benefit of the doubt. If we’re talking about like murder, I don’t know if there’s ever a good reason for that. Maybe not.
Amy: Yes, there’s a whole level.
Sarah: Not really. If we remove the murder part and we just replace that with bad decisions that we would define as bad decisions or a misalignment of values or a I would never do that and they do something they don’t understand that there’s always something to it. Everybody has a history they bring in, whatever his was. I don’t know if you know his background as far as what he’s been through. You do? Are you at liberty to tell us?
Amy: He had a very challenging childhood. He was one of– I’m making up the number– I want to say 10 children. He was close to his mother, lost his mother traumatically at a very young age. Lost his father. He was also from what we understand abused at a young age. He actually attempted to murder one of his sister’s boyfriends when he was only nine years old. He was deeply, deeply disturbed from his childhood. Deeply disturbed.
That doesn’t mean that everyone who has a traumatic childhood– I had a traumatic childhood. It doesn’t lead to these terrible things. This is not an excuse and there’s no excuse for what he did. It is just looking at him as a human he was a child once and he was not given the help he deserved.
Sarah: Yes. In his developmental years, something shifted in his brain that led to a demented– I know, at least from the movie. I know that you can correct us on the movie. That’s probably where I’ll go next is, “What are the things that aren’t true?” When people go watch this movie, what are we like, “No, I got the inside scoop”? From the movie, it seemed like there was a clear mental health component of a misinterpretation of what was going on or what the patient needed almost that justified his actions that was a little misplaced.
Amy: Yes, there was no justification. There was no reasoning. He played Russian roulette. He would poison the bags of our med room. He would go in there and poison each one of the bags and we as the nurses would hang those bags, so there was no rhyme or reason. Sometimes he would murder more when there was something traumatic going on for instance around the time of his mother’s death or a birthday or there were patterns they could follow.
He definitely did not have this mercy-killing belief. He was not a mercy killer. He used paralytics and would watch people suffer as they died.
Sarah: Oh, wow.
Amy: There was no mercy killing. I wanted to believe he was a mercy killer. He was not. To get into all of the sadness of it all and the terror of it all, he did not truly follow any pattern. He just murdered and enjoyed murdering.
Sarah: Okay. Is there anything else from the movie that you want to correct?
Amy: He never met my daughters. My daughters will say that the biggest takeaway is how my daughters were so respectful of me. My oldest daughter, when she saw the movie, it really bothered her because the oldest daughter in the movie really gave me a hard time. My oldest daughter would never have done that. He never met my children. Now, the understanding of why they made those decisions, it was to help people understand just how close we were because we weren’t close. If I had lived near the hospital, I lived three and a half hours away, I was a travel nurse, he would have met my children.
When he confessed, he did not confess in a way where he was berated by the prosecution. It was in a very calm setting. It wasn’t that way at all. There was the sweater scene though. That was real.
Sarah: Interesting. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out. Cool. Anything else that you’ve learned that you want to leave our nurses with as we wrap up that like a message, a takeaway that you want to leave our nurses?
Amy: I think being very clear about our own moral compass and understanding we can live by that moral compass without making waves. I think there is a beauty in doing things gently. I think there are moments where, for me, I could be very loud about my disagreements with physicians and my disagreements about policy and it never really got me anywhere. Where I was able to make a difference was putting myself in situations where I had a voice and it wasn’t necessarily disagreeing loudly at the bedside.
Sarah: I love that. Thank you so much for your time, for sharing your story, being so open with us, and-
Amy: Thank you for having me.
Sarah: -coming into our side of things. If people wanted to find you, where can they find you?
Amy: Amythegoodnurse.com. You can also look at Most Important Patient where I am running retreats for the mental health and mental wellness of healthcare workers.
Sarah: Love it. We’ll link everything in the show notes below.
Thanks for spending your time with us during this episode of Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses. If you like what you heard, it helps us both if you subscribe, rate, leave a raving review, and share this episode with a friend. If you want more from us, head to bundlebirthnurses.com or follow us on Instagram. Now it’s your turn to go and figure out what outside factors can help you down-regulate your nervous system, cope, and grow from all the hard things that we face in our job. You’re worth it, you deserve it, and it’s so important for us to find those therapeutic modalities for us to heal ourselves. We’ll see you next time.