Jennifer Todd

A Life in Nursing: A Journey of Connection and Care

My nursing journey started with my mom, Ruth, when I was in third grade.

That’s when she went back to school to become a nurse.

At a time when most moms stayed home, and dads worked, she followed her passion, becoming an example for my brother and me that, at the time, I didn’t fully understand but was watching my future and what service looks like up close.

Finding My Path

You see, I didn’t start out planning to be a nurse.

I went to the University of Evansville with the intention of studying secondary education and sports medicine. My goal was to be an athletic trainer.

But in 1991, when I transferred to SIUC, something changed.

I still remember that moment, standing with my mom in our kitchen, right before moving to Carbondale, and telling her I wanted to be a nurse.

Her response, “It’s about time.”

That fall, I started nursing school at Kaskaskia College.

Learning the Heart of Healthcare

As a nursing student, for my first job in the field, I worked as a nursing assistant at St. Mary’s Hospital in Centralia. I worked in medical-surgical units, the ICU, and telemetry.

It was a high-pressure but practical major reality check about what nursing really is. It is not just tasks or charts. It is showing up for moms, dads, children, and too often, people who literally don’t have someone, at the hardest moments of their lives.

One of my first patients, a woman who had suffered a stroke and didn’t speak much, was one of the first patients who made me feel like a nurse.

It was simple; I would make silly faces when I walked into her room in the hopes of getting her to smile.

She started calling me “Funny Face.”

I’ll never forget her smile. She also provided me with a sobering introduction to the profound cycle of life and loss I would witness throughout my career.

Her funeral was the first patient service I attended. That stays with you. It changes how you see people and how you understand care.

A Career Without Borders

Nursing took me across Illinois, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, and California. Every hospital, every unit, and every patient taught me something different about healthcare and about people.

Eventually, I settled in Florida and transitioned into hospice care. That is where I came to understand the deepest side of nursing.

Hospice is not about giving up. It is about dignity, comfort, honesty, and making sure patients and families do not feel alone during some of the hardest moments of their lives.

I cared for families trying to hold everything together while preparing to say goodbye to someone they loved. I cared for patients who did not want false promises. They wanted comfort, honesty delivered gently, and someone willing to sit beside them and listen.

During that time, I was pregnant with my daughter, Jane, and my patients shared in that joy alongside me.

One patient, who later moved into hospice care, gave Jane her very first stuffed animal. We still have it today.

Another patient quietly saved her spare change to help me buy diapers because, as she told me, that was exactly what she had done for her own children years before.

Those moments stay with you.

They remind you that nursing is not just medications, procedures, or charts. It is relationships, trust, and the humanity people show each other even in the hardest moments.

Fulfilling a Promise

After Jane was born, I returned to bedside nursing. Before my mother passed away, she asked one thing of me: "Promise me you’ll do something in nursing that makes you happy." Since her passing, I have honored that promise by exploring every corner of the profession:

• Nurse Education: Sharing knowledge with the next generation.

• Legal & Clinical Review: Working for a law firm, reviewing medical records, and assisting in lawsuits.

• Case Management: Assisting with Medicaid billing and insurance appeals, which provided the flexibility to move Jane and me back home to Illinois.

• School Nursing: Bringing my experience full circle to care for students.

Nursing has allowed me to challenge myself, learn the many sides of healthcare, and, most importantly, understand the profound impact of human connection. 

I’ve realized that while the technical skills are vital, it’s the "funny faces" and the shared stories that truly define a career in care.

Managing Unexpected Change

While working in the ICU after my daughter Jane was born, I woke up one morning with severe low back pain. I could still move and walk, so I did what nurses often do—I kept going and got myself to a chiropractor. But instead of improving, the pain escalated quickly.

It got worse.

Eventually, it became so intense that I nearly passed out. Imaging showed a large herniated disc, and in 2007, I underwent my first back surgery. I returned to work, determined to stay at the bedside I loved.

Two years later, in 2009, the pain returned. This time, it required a second surgery, more complex, with spinal fusion and hardware to stabilize my spine. I went back to work again, but I was no longer able to fully meet the physical demands of ICU nursing. And because of my restrictions, I ultimately lost my position.

So I did what nurses do when everything changes: I adapted. I packed up my life and moved with Jane so I could return to work in a different capacity, and eventually, I found my way back into nursing. I returned to the ICU for a time and later stepped into a Nurse Educator role in a Florida hospital. I then moved into a neurology unit in Orlando, continuing to care for patients in a different setting, but still at the bedside I had fought so hard to return to.

Then the hardware failed.

I underwent a second, two-stage spinal surgery. Afterward, my surgeon looked at me and said he had fixed my back, but he didn’t give me a new one. When I asked when I could return to work, the answer was clear. I would not be going back to bedside nursing.

That moment changed everything.

My New Nursing Normal

Nursing had been my passion for all of my adult life, and this setback wasn’t going to change my commitment to patients. 

I transitioned into working from home, writing insurance appeals for a large hospital system, which allowed me to fight for the patient and the in-hospital services that were deemed medically necessary by their physician. It was still healthcare, still patient-centered—but from the other side of the system, where care is often decided by approvals, denials, and timing that patients cannot afford to lose. That role allowed me to bring Jane home to raise her here, where I grew up.

I continued to follow where nursing needed me. I worked for a law firm reviewing medical records and supporting complex cases. This experience has shown me where our healthcare systems have failed not only patients but also those working at the bedside, due to short staffing and missed medications. 

I became a school nurse, bringing my experience back to where it first began, with children, families, and the everyday moments that shape a community’s health. Schools bring in dentists and eye doctors for students on Medicaid due to the inability to find the services that would accept the insurance.

Over time, I began to see the same pattern in every place I had worked. Whether at the bedside, in hospice care, in hospitals, in schools, or in insurance appeals, I saw how deeply policy decisions shape patient outcomes. I saw how often delays, denials, and coverage gaps became barriers to care that nurses then had to try to solve in real time.

And I saw something else, too. 

Our representation, our voice in Congress, was making too many decisions about healthcare without ever having lived what those decisions actually do to patients and families. 

When I look at the votes and positions from my now opponent, Mary Miller, I see support that leaves working families with higher costs, fewer protections, and more uncertainty in their healthcare and insurance coverage.

That is not abstract to me. I have sat with patients waiting for approvals. I have helped families navigate insurance denials when time mattered. I have seen what those decisions feel like on the ground.

That is why I am running for Congress.

Because nurses understand what policy looks like when it becomes real. We understand what it means when a decision made in Washington shows up at a bedside, in a billing office, or in a family’s emergency room visit.

We need more nurses in Congress, not fewer.

We need people who understand that healthcare is not just a system on paper. It is a person waiting for answers, a family trying to make decisions under pressure, and a clinician trying to hold it all together when the system does not.

My career has taken me from ICU bedsides to hospice rooms, from school health offices to insurance appeals and legal review. Everywhere I have gone, the lesson has been the same: care is connected, and policy is never separate from the people it touches.

And nurses do not stop being nurses when we leave the hospital.

We carry that responsibility, and those patients, with us everywhere we go.

It is time that perspective had a place in Congress.