The Last to Know — The Price Healthcare Workers Pay for Ignoring Their Own Symptoms

Clinician Self-Neglect and the Cost of Late Diagnosis: what three decades in intensive and long-term care reveal about the people who put off seeking care for themselves.

Nurses spot a subtle change in a patient within seconds, then explain away their own headaches, numbness and vision trouble for months. The misconception is that clinical training makes someone a better judge of their own symptoms, when the habit of putting the patient first delays the appointment until there is no appointment left, only emergency surgery. Thirty years across intensive care and long-term care, including running nursing departments as a Director of Care, ended with a brain tumor, a coma, and relearning how to walk and speak. Listeners get the warning signs clinicians talk themselves out of.

About Jennifer White

Jennifer White, podcast guest

Retired Registered Nurse, Medical Thriller Author and Resilience Speaker

RN Retired Registered NurseAuthor Medical thriller authorSpeaker Resilience and reinvention for healthcare professionalsSurvivor Brain tumor survivor

Jenny White is a retired Registered Nurse, medical thriller author and brain tumor survivor from Southwestern Ontario, where she lives on the shores of Lake Erie.

For more than 30 years Jenny worked as a Registered Nurse across intensive care and long-term care, including time as a Director of Care in long-term care facilities. That career ended when a brain tumor required emergency surgery. She woke from a coma unable to walk or speak, and faced a long, uncertain recovery that took away not only physical function but her sense of who she was.

Determined to heal, Jenny turned to creativity as therapy. She began writing children's stories alongside her constant companion, her Maltese dog Molson, which became the Molson and Jenny Adventure Series. What started as a way to retrain her brain grew into a new career as an author.

Her Abbey Roberts medical thriller series draws directly on her years in healthcare. The debut, The Triggering Scent, follows a nurse whose return to the ICU brings her face to face with a dangerous neurosurgeon from her past. The second book, Terror at the Manor, takes Abbey into long-term care, where a murder at a Toronto nursing home exposes problems inside the system.

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