This week, two readers left a five-star reviews of My Name is Kim, and one of them has stayed with me.

He wrote that he is a healthcare provider, a husband, a father of four, and the oldest child, someone who is always taking care of others, usually behind the scenes. On some days, he said, that can leave you feeling a little bit used. Then he quoted the book back to me: “Tiny leaves grow from my heart.” For him, it was the moment of reflecting on his family and the patients who become like family.

I have spent a lot of years caring for people, and I know that feeling well. I wrote Kim’s story hoping it would meet someone on an ordinary, tiring day and remind them that what they give does come back to them, sometimes as tiny leaves, sometimes as floodwaters that leaves you greener than before.

He wasn’t sure he had understood the book “completely right”. I don’t think there is a wrong way to be moved by it.

Thank you to everyone who has spent time with Kim. If you’ve read it, a short review means more than you know.

With gratitude,

Sandra

My Name is Kim is available now in Kindle and hardcover.

When it rains, it pours.

It’s still pouring in my life. I have been soaked this whole time. I am just passing through. This is not my destination. Where is my destination? So many pit stops, I got lost on the path I am on. Everyone went about their way so I followed. The rest of the world moved on, so I did. A path is still a path. When you’re good and true, you will be blessed. I heard that from somewhere. That somewhere seemed very far from me- almost unreachable. What I have instead are rocks. And walls. Tall walls. Dead ends.

I kept going anyways. I trudged on. And on. Up to now.

I’m older and wiser. Tired of this process. I used up my umbrella many times it bore holes on it. Yes I could use a fortune cookie. One that says my luck will finally change with a piece of the sweetness it brings. I could use some wisdom from Forrest Gump right now. Just have the taste of the good life.

Being alive is precious. But living a good life is the hardest. I can always buy a cookie. Hold a job that pays. But finding joy these days..there is war in the world somewhere. There is hunger, there is greed. These things are man-made. All these are bigger than me. The world we promise to become better have turned to such a state. A man made state of being. I am just a tiny part of it.

Where is joy these days?

Like many of you, coming this far wasn’t easy. I made it here not by pure luck at all. Many times I wanted to stop and give the world the finger. Living shouldn’t be this hard, right? Yet, I just went on my way, quietly. No endings are the same. Just like the rain never falls in the same place.

My life still has to matter.

I really could use a fortune cookie right now.

My thoughts exactly.

What I am was a struggling nurse surviving challenges in the hospital setting. Working nights for many years, my days were spent sleeping and my nights, awake, battling life and death in its complexities. Yet in my quiet moments, I write. A few words here and there, until I have a poem. And if I get lucky sometimes, I write a short story. Most of the time, it ends with a few words. Oftentimes, I never get to finish them. I knew the endings before I wrote them. The title would always come first. The story unfolds as I write the words. That’s how I write stories.

Kim did not have a title at all. She came out when I was trying to envision a bright world after COVID. COVID dragged out the worst in humanity. One that we feared would happen if we suffered from a world outbreak. No one can truly imagine what occurred during the “Plague” era. When a big population of the world was wiped out but with COVID, it was a wake-call for everyone. Science for all its milestones, has still its limits. It made me want to go back to the past. Just armed with the basics, people did manage to survive. Even without the science.

What had survived all these years?

Tradition? Remembrance? Memories?

Who witnessed life and death through the ages? Aside from books and science?

I wanted something tangible, something alive, something quiet but tall enough to be seen. Loud enough without saying anything. Near enough, that you could see them everywhere.

A living witness to life’s glory and defeat.

A tree.

And so came the birth of a story. Not of Kim yet. I wanted a character that is old and wise, one that is present from the start. Yet because of its constant presence, we ignored its value, because it’s always there. In time, we had forgotten about it. When trouble comes, it is not the first thing that we look for. Yet, it is the first thing we actually see. Because they are always everywhere. So tree it is.

I am a little biased, I must admit. Tolkien’s books upped my imagination about trees to a higher level. But it was my fondness of trees that gave me the urge to make it the main character of my short story. Not of the book yet. As a child with little means, where do I go to play? Outside and I go to the first tree that caught my eye. I climbed it, swung on its branches, get its fruits, used its shade, and hide in it. It is basically there for the taking.

Next comes the human part. I wanted something relatable and common. Like everyday people just trying to get by day by day modern life. What could an ancient, quiet tree offer a mother who had carried the weight of the world on her shoulders yet, hoping her child survives. Still bright and shining, despite how heavy it is. Using only the basics of what life offered from the beginning of the world, to the secret and mystery of the human heart, against the stark and cold reality of the modern world. All the modern technology of science versus the raw, simplicity of Mother Nature. We don’t have to look far for the answer. Our hearts, what’s instilled in there will show us the answer.

Mother Nature.

Human Nature.

Hand in hand, they will find the answers the modern world will never be able to. Together, they are unbeatable.

Everyone can be heroes in my story.

That’s the world that I want to live.

That is the story I want to write.

That is how My Name is Kim came to life.

I did not win. I did not get the award. Yet, somehow, what started as a short story became a book. And it did not end from there. There is a Book 2. And a Book 3. Yes. It is a trilogy. Again, it is unplanned. My journey with Kim could not end with only one book. Kim’s world is wider, richer, bigger than life itself. The name Kim was named after a mother who is widowed now but is currently living her best life yet. Life after seeing her husband battling through cancer, being a mother to her two kids. And even after becoming a widow, life had more surprises saved for her.

Life, for what it took, it also gives.

I am a witness to her story. And since life does go on, there is Book 2 and Book 3.

The trilogy is written out and complete. I pray the legacy of Kim will live through for years to come.

My Name is Kim came out this April. My audience is limited. A part of me wants to go for the easy way. To pay an audience to make good reviews and give all the numbers and the likes for Kim. But my book is not about that, if at some point, someone will read Kim and see the world that she lived in be a reason to give them hope, make them smile, then get up and face the world again, I will give that salute to them. The book had served its purpose.

Let it be the light, when the darkness seems too vast, too heavy.

Let it find you.

I am a spontaneous person I would say. I live for the moment. Like most human beings I know, I get up each morning with no plans for the rest of the day. This is how I went through life ever since I can remember. Challenges, I take them as it comes. Hiccups, I’ve always had a lot of those. Dreams, those too. They came hand in hand, I cannot tell which one from the other. I only know life is only good as it gets.

Or, hard as it gets.

Growing up, I was the youngest of five. That wasn’t too bad. I was the apple of everyone’s eyes. My mother’s heart, I supposed- or whatever’s left of it. We were a handful five. I was the bearer of everyone’s hand-me-downs. That’s a given. I never learned to say “Thank you “ for them. From books, to clothes, to games, to toys, to hobbies. Again, it was a given. That’s how I carried most stuff growing up. It was handed to me.

Even my dreams.

Our eldest is special, so he is exempted. But my eldest sister is a dentist, my brother is a doctor, my other sister is a lawyer, and I, the youngest will be a nurse. That wasn’t too bad, right? Except that, that’s the plan handed to me by the family. Fast forward to now, we did not end up exactly as planned but, at that time, all that has happened, was handed to us by life.

Life handed to us by our parents, from the life they lived, also handed to them from theirs. That was the pattern of life we are to follow. But nothing in life is permanent. If it has other plans for us, that’s where the chaos starts. One tries to hold on to the familiarity, the comfort it brought them. Just to keep from straying. You are lost without it. Your arms and limbs are cut off, a big part of you is gone. How do you put the pieces back together- the one that are still there?

I became a nurse as predicted. I did not stray from the path. It wasn’t my dream but I became it. Each day I woke up dreading the work ahead of me. I did not like sticking up a needle to someone’s vein to draw blood and miss it. To me, it is a rather big, big struggle- enormous, humongous- you name it - it is a big deal to me. Like, the sun. I always hated needles. Why did I became a nurse? That’s the big question, isn’t it?

It all has to do with my hands. My hands always gave me trouble. They never follow what I ask them to do. They were never stable enough. I was fifteen when I began my love-hate relationship with my hands. All I wanted was a steady hand salute to give to my officers on my junior year. I failed to do that. You can call it nerves. But I did it calm and by myself, it was still there. The tremors- I really hated those. I learned to live with it- but I still hated it. Anything to do with steady, I hate it with a vengeance.

That’s how I lived up to now.

That’s how nursing for me is. It was never my dream to be one. I hate that I could never be the perfect nurse. One that is steady. It is either a hit or miss. Life did play a big trick for me. I hated it because of what I cannot be as one. But there never was a day, or night I went home thinking I did not do enough to save my patient’s life. I went to bed and slept and woke up- faced another rough night ahead of me. I did this for many, many years. I did get the awards, the accolades and the medals my exceptional colleagues did. What I got was a flat “thank you” from my patients who survived a bad night. From doctors avoiding me from the hallways after I hunted them and woke them most nights for patient’s abnormal labs or vital signs. A grateful smile from my charge nurse for showing up when it’s needed. My colleagues for my smile and support when they needed it. This is how I survived nursing.

Life really isn’t handed out to us in a plate. What we knew before from how life was given to us may not always turn out to be our destination. Chances are, they will not be. One lesson I did learned though, was we live our life the best way we can.

I’ve yet learned to say thank you-

to my younger self for not giving up, in spite of the hiccups.

To my hands, for keeping it steady to my nursing years.

To nursing, for being my bread and butter to my table and soul.

To my current self, for dreaming again.

To my family, for their love and support.

To my readers and Substacks, for this space,

I can breathe.

To life,

Thank you.

When AI first showed up on our units, it was brilliant, and I was proud to be part of it. It flagged sepsis before we would caught it ourselves - a fever of 101, a respiratory rate climbing past twenty, a bloop pressure sliding the wrong way, and the computer would light up before I’d even finished my rounds. On the monitors, it caught rhythms turning irregular, an ST segment lifting or dropping, the first signs of a heart attack no one in the room had noticed yet. All of it meant fewer complications, faster treatment, patients who got to walk out instead of coding on us. I believed it was going to make our load lighter.

On one hand, it did. On the other, it gave the system room to add more.

That’s the part I want to be precise about, because it isn’t AI’s fault. AI didn’t decide I should also be the secretary, the monitor tech, the housekeeping staff, the respiratory tech, the patient advocate, and the phlebotomist , all inside one twelve-hour shift. People decided that. The efficiency AI bought us didn’t get handed back to us as room to breathe - it got quickly absorbed as more room to fill. We got faster, so they asked for more. We got more resilient, so they asked for more still. Burnout is the word everyone reaches for, but burnout makes it sound like something that happens to a body on its own, the way weather happens. It isn’t weather. It’s a decision, made by someone who isn’t standing at the bedside, about how much one person can be asked to carry before she breaks.

And we are taught to be resilient in critical moments. So when they push a little more to accommodate a little more, we stretch. We are good at stretching. We stretch until one day - it might take days, months, years, it’s different for everyone - you realize you don’t have anything left to give. That’s the day nurses leave the bedside. Not because they stopped caring. Because the caring finally ran out of room to live in them.

Nurses are healers. We were taught skills to heal, with a heart full of gold and the strive to do better. When the passion dies slowly, because the system swallowed it instead of nurturing it, we have no choice but to go looking for another home - somewhere that can hold us the way we hold our patients. Somewhere that notices when we’re running on empty before we do, the way our monitors are trained to catch a heart before it stops.

If we find a place like that, that’s where we’ll stay.

Missing?

A home for the nurses.

The reward?

Unconditional love.

Work has taken more from my life than anything else in this world. My time with my family, my peace of mind- I lost those along the way. My dreams- it swallowed... Work didn’t take my weekends. It took birthdays. It took dinners. It took afternoons that belonged to my family. And even took the woman who once believed she would write books someday. My foolish self, cast aside and lost in the process. Now that I’m stuck here, in this hole, I want to find myself again. That self looking back at me with that cold, defeated look in her eyes. I barely recognized that person anymore.

“Endings are beginnings.”

Those words from a song kept playing in my mind, It is a love song but this here is not. This is the life that I chose as a way to live. Knowing what I know now, I would like to tell my younger self to be brave and defy the odds the world has lined up for her. My heart and my courage have led me only up to here. I maybe a little wiser now, but I still don’t know any better.

Honesty sucks that way. It’s brutal when it hits the mark. It is too bright. It is blinding sometimes. I wish though, that it would set me free. I would gladly move on and climb out of this hole of misery. The path I am on seems like a never-ending maze. The goal is not even mine to take. I am just a pawn, easily taken down and replaceable.

Have I really lost my way?

Have I really lost her?

Sailing in the unknown, to a land somewhere-maybe she’s been there waiting for me all this time.

I’ll keep swimming.

In the sea of doubt.

The road to freedom.

The road to her.

To hear that is every nurses’s nightmare. You spend years working hard to the best you can. Often missing lunch, skipping breaks, holding your bladder to care for your patients. Year after year, those sacrifices become routine. Then one day, they are reduced to a single sentence.

“You did not meet the quota.”

Should care be measured?

In numbers?

In how quickly you move from one patient to the next ?

In how you efficiently end a conversation?

Isn’t it all one-sided?

You know you did a good job but at the back of your mind, a tiny doubt begins to linger.

You begin to question your efforts.

Your skill.

Your worth.

How inhuman to think of it that way.

We are in the caring business but who cares for us-the caregivers?

We are just part of the equation.

Productivity has no heart.

Perhaps, that is the tragedy.

Care remembers people.

Productivity remembers numbers.

A verbal warning.

Loud enough to topple your world.

The sum of it all- your hard work and sacrifice.

You are only as good as it comes.

Tomorrow holds no promises.

Will this count too?

Drowning.

We’ve all been drowning each time we come to work. It doesn’t matter how you swim, fast or slow, or barely floating.

It is still drowning.

We normalized it by thinking if we could survive one heavy shift, we could survive a heavier one. And yes, you told yourself “You can do it !”, over and over again, until you believe it. At the end of each shift, you walk out defeated.

That is the truth nobody wants to hear.

Now here comes the new nurses and the student nurses. You want to set a good example to them. That taking care of a human being is the noblest job in the world. Here, you teach them how to log in the computer, look at a patient’s file, their labs, their meds, their doctors. In the end, they ended up not looking at the patient from all the commotions. Missing the most important point. Where is the caring? And how we teach them is , if you did not chart it, it didn’t happen.

The consequences.

Somebody speaks out. This is too heavy. It is not safe. We’re short-staffed. Can you make it better? That big question directed to management. Written out in the employee surveys. Discussed on the town hall meetings. The higher ups listened.

Their answer is looking back at you with these words, “How can you make it better?”

Consequences.

Twenty-five years of nursing and I still don’t have the answer to that.

Caring has become my greatest burden.

I wish I had more time to take care of my patients.

I wish.

I woke up today feeling a little strange. I had long given up my night shifts and switched to days. A regular eight-to-four job. Five days a week. No weekends, no holidays perks- that took a load of burden off my shoulders. Or so i thought. There are others things I realize that were missing in my life. Days that provide no light for me, even if literally can see it everyday now, they do not offer what I craved for. I lived in Texas where the sun can shine its brightest. It can engulf you in its scorching, burning heat. So, still, I chose to lived indoors, in the cool shade of my home.

I work days now. I go to sleep like the rest of the world at nights. I am finally living like a normal person. I should feel alive, right?

I’m not.

I remembered vividly coming out of nightshift , walking out in the parking lot and out in the open blue sky was a rainbow so beautiful, so magnificent in its color. I felt like I witnessed a miracle right before my very eyes. My job carries heavy weight of caring for fragile lives, I’ve almost forgotten these little joys that’s still out there. A nice gentle breeze, a fresh breath of sunshine, a faint scent of flowers nearby, and the humming of the birds hidden, somewhere among the trees. These are things that remind me of the old days, my childhood, my youth, my care-free days. These were all from my past.

When did I stop looking outside? I was so busy just trying to survive the night, making sure my patients were alive just to come back next day, re-living the same set-up, over and over again. So many years it took from me. Living in that never ending cycle of life and death. I seriously felt there was no way out. It the same thing everywhere, everyday. Yup, no way out. So, I stayed in that hole. A hole I thought would be the end of me. I did not look anywhere else. Somehow, I remembered Miss Copolla’s smile, and I wanted to see that smile so badly. I’m a pretty simple-minded person. I decided to give up nights and work on days now. I thought I’ll see Miss Copolla again.

Not yet.

I walked outside today and saw the world. The world as it is. I walked my dog over a little piece of pond, covered with well-trimmed grass around it, with trimmed flowers and trees planted around the area. Picture-perfect. Yes, it is beautiful thing to see. I smelled the freshly scent of mowed grass. I also see how hard it is to keep this place like this. The hands that planted the plants, kept the place clean and heavenly. If only people were made that way, we would all be living happily right now.

I am still looking for a way out. Until then, I will keep looking for Miss Copolla.

Not because I hadn’t been working. I had started three IVs, turned a patient who couldn’t turn himself, held a daughter’s hand while her father’s numbers dropped. I had done the work of nursing. What I hadn’t done was prove it- not yet, not in the system that decides whether the hospital gets paid, whether the unit passes the audit, whether I did my job.

Nurses spend up to forty percent of s shift on documentations. I didn’t need a study to tell me that. I have felt it in my shoulders, in the hour I stayed after clock-out, in the meals I didn’t eat because there was one more note to finish before the next one started.

For twenty-five years, I worked in waters that were never smooth. Choppy with billing codes. Undertow with liability. Every field I filled in fed a database built up to protect the hospital, not to help the nurse standing at the bedside. Care and paperwork became two separate jobs wearing the same scrubs, and only one of them could be measured, so only one of them counted.

I told you last week about Miss Copolla. About caring that asked nothing for more than the basic, honest work of it. I have spent a career trying to find my way back to that caring, rowing against a current built for someone else’s bottom line.

So when people ask me what I think about AI coming for healthcare, I don’t think about robots. I think about time. I think about whether, for once, a system might be built for us- the ones who do the caring- instead of only for the ones who count the cost of it.

Here is the plain truth about the old system. It was never designed for with the nurse in mind. The electronic chart exists to protect the hospital from lawsuits and to justify what gets billed. Every click, every dropdown, every mandatory field is a small tax collected from the only person in the building who is actually touching the patient.

I have paid that tax for twenty-five years. In missed breaks. In charting after my child was asleep. In the particular exhaustion of doing a full day’s caring and then doing a second, invisible shift just to prove that I did.

So I went looking. Is there such a system built for us instead of against us?

There might be, and it surprised me to find real evidence of it.

At Cedars-Sinai, an AI assistant called Aiva was handed to nurses who had decades on the floor- some with over forty years experience, pretty skeptical about anything with the word “smart” attached to it. The ones who doubted it hardest are now the ones who say it gave them back in real time, time they hadn’t expected to get back at this stage of a career built on doing without.

At UCLA Health, something even more telling is happening. Nurses aren’t just handed the tool and told to adapt. They sit in the room while it’s built. They test it, break it, tell the engineers what’s wrong with it, and the tool changes because a nurse said so. That is the whole argument, right there. Technology built with the people who do the caring, not for them by people who have never stood at the bedside at three in the morning.

That distinction is everything. Miss Copolla’s caring never needed anyone’s permission or design. Ours does now- but for the first time in a long while, some of that design is finally including the nurse in the room.

i want to be honest with you though, because smooth water can still hide rocks underneath.

Most hospitals still have no real policy for how these tools should be used. The technology is moving faster than the guardrails around it. And i understand the fear some of my fellow nurses carry- that leaning too hard on a machine could dull an instinct that took years on the floor to earn.I know what that instinct feels like. It is not something I would trade for convenience, and I don’t think any nurse worth her scrubs would either.

So this isn’t a piece about AI saving nursing. It’s a piece about whether we, the nurses, get a hand on the wheel this time- instead of being told, once again to keep rowing.

I think about the twelve-hour shift again. The one where I hadn’t touched the chart by hour eight.

I imagine it differently now. The vitals already logged before I’ve left the room, because the machine caught what I had said out loud while my hands were still on the patient. The note half-written before I sit down, because it listened to the parts that mattered and skipped the parts that didn’t. Not a nurse replaced. A nurse cleared of the noise, so I can do the one thing no machine can- sit at the bedside a little longer, hold the hand that needs holding, notice the ting that isn’t in any dropdown menu.

Maybe that is what smooth water actually means. Not that the work gets easier. Just that, for once, I am not the one bailing it out alone.

In a couple of minutes, Miss Copolla used to say, and somehow it was always enough. Maybe that’s all I’m asking of this new tide. A couple of minutes given back to me, so I can spend them the way she taught me-on the person in front of me, and nothing else.

Four feet eight inches. That was all of her.

But her voice could call an army in no time, no weight behind it needed. She didn’t have to raise it. It just carried- the way small women do sometimes, like the size of a person has nothing to do with the size of a room they can fill.

I called her Miss Copolla. Short for “a couple of minutes.”

That was her answer to everything.

How long till you’re done?

“In a couple of minutes.”

How long till you get here?

“In a couple of minutes.”

Hurry up!

“In a couple of minutes!”

Hang on a second!

“Give me a couple of minutes!”

She started and ended her stories with a couple of minutes. It was her favorite expression for all kinds of errands, all kinds of days. It meant wait. It meant I’m coming. It meant don’t rush me, I’ve got this. And once, when I needed it most, it meant something closer to a blessing.

Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.

“In a couple of minutes.”

I met her in my early nanny days here in America. I was a nanny first, before I became a nurse- reviewing for my state boards, single, and not knowing a single soul in this country. My introduction to American life started very humbly. Three little ones and a tiny woman with a big voice were the first people who made a stranger’s country feel like it might, eventually, be mine.

She had three kids of her own, all of whom adored her. Caring, for her, was a given- no pressure beyond the basic job of it. Take care of the little ones. Do it honestly. Get paid fairly at the end of the day. That was the whole arrangement. Nothing more was of her, and she had never asked for more than that in return.

She is retired now. But she never really left. She has become an extension of the family she cared for. The kids are grown, with families of their own, and they still call her, still visit her on special occasions, still count her as theirs. That is what real caring does. It doesn’t end when the job does.

She made my stay in America bearable in those first few years. I did not have any family here yet. I had her.

Through her eyes, I saw caring in its most basic form. Just being a nice human being. Taking care of the basic. Most of us have forgotten how a simple upbringing - humor, hard work, integrity - can mold a child to deal with life’s imperfections. We have made caring complicated. She never did.

Caring is powerful that way. it builds you into something great. And its absence -slow, quiet, unannounced - feeds you seeds of mistrust instead, until it becomes an unhealthy mindset that, left long enough, self-destructs.

I did not know it then, in those early years, humble and unmoored. But Miss Copolla was giving me something i would spend the rest of my career trying to give back - to patients, to family, to strangers on their worst days.

She just needed a couple of minutes.

Turns out, that was enough to last a lifetime.

I think about her now, on the floor, in a job she never had to do.

Because nursing today is not measured in a couple of minutes anymore. It is measured in minutes, period. Counted, time-stamped, entered into a field. How long to start an IV. How long to draw the labs, admit the patient, discharge the patient. How long did it take to give the meds. Twelve hours, sliced into intervals, and every intervals belongs to the paper, not the person.

Caring itself, gets the yellow flag. Not because it didn’t happen- because it can’t be proven the way the rest can. We say we care for you by doing this. By clicking the box, by charting the vitals, by finishing the note before the next one starts. Care gets pushed back to make room for more to document. The actual sitting with someone, the actual caring - that has no field of its own. There is nowhere to enter it.

And if the sick gets better, count it lucky. She did her job. As if getting better were the paperwork’s doing, and not the years of instinct nobody put in a box.

I keep asking myself what nursing will look like in the years ahead, if this keeps being the shape of it. Whether there is a future where a nurse can still be Miss Copolla to somebody- no pressure beyond the basic, honest work of taking care of another person- instead of a nurse being asked to prove, that the caring even happened at all.

Lately, I have started to wonder if the answer might be a strange one. Not a person this time, but a machine - the same technology that has, in many ways, made things harder for us on the floor. I did not expect to look for hope there. But i have started to see glimpses of it. Nurses, decades into their careers, being handed tools built with them instead of for them, told that hand back the very thing Miss Copolla gave freely - time, and the room to actually care.

I do not know yet if the water gets any smoother.

But if you’ll give me a couple of minutes each Saturday, I’d like to find out with you.

Sometimes, it takes longer than a day, a week, a month. Battles fought from within, body and soul. Plenty of times, you ask yourself why. The words come, but the body refuses. Pride always comes first. Exhaustion? Maybe. Frustration? So be it. At the end of the day, you come up empty. That’s the worst feeling you can have. So, you pick up your pen. Write your way until you feel better.

Dead ends.

That’s how i deal with it.

What’s your take?

How do you deal with dead ends?

Subscribe now