From leaping around 3-foot-tall hurdles on the observe field to leaping in excess of hurdles on the West Palm Seaside VA healthcare facility floor, Patrina Allen, Intensive Care Device Nurse (ICU) Manager, redefines stamina.
For 8 yrs she remains by the side of Veterans all through their most critical moments. Her enthusiasm to provide is just one that stems from a unique spot – her bloodline. Growing up her mom was a nurse and her sister a support member in the U.S. Military coupled together she knew her company to her country belonged nowhere else but with the Veterans Wellness Administration.
As the moment an athlete of the most difficult Olympic monitor and discipline division, little did she know decades later on how the one lap of 10-400-meter hurdles would support her to compete in today’s demo of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to her white coat times, her apparel was efficiency functioning gear and keep track of sneakers. As an Olympic contestant in 2000 and 2004, her stamina laid extra than in just her legs to glide more than each hurdle in her route, it is also stored mentally to push her home to the complete line.
The Olympic athlete claims, “I was experienced physically but also mentally for monitor and discipline. I was trained in mental toughness and how to mentally get around distinct hurdles without dropping concentration. This mentality stays with me and brings right above in my career.”
Her laser-emphasis educated by her coaches contributes to her now clinical heroic leadership. Amid uncertainty, the loss of lives, and the unknown of what is subsequent, the ICU workforce looks to Nurse Supervisor, Ms. Allen, for nothing small of positive affirmation.
Her perception in clinical care, goes past the classic medications, and leaps into the hurdle of emotional guidance. Her beneficial mindset is a gift she spreads from hospital room to healthcare facility home as a welcoming force to remind Veterans of the toughness they keep to overpower the reason for their inpatient keep.
What she refers to as her ‘tunnel vision’ from her former athletic decades, is what she not only embraces in her VA support now, but as her coaches after did, she is much too instructing to her workforce and Veterans.
She states, “The more durable the problem to a lot more I concentration on what I want to do.”
Even though the complete line is now at the hands of her treatment to Veterans and no for a longer time at the end of a lap, she continue to compares that unwavering emotion.
The Olympic contestant remembers, “When I would compete, my legs would be hefty and my mind depleted, but over all my mental energy brought me to one more realm of a eyesight so narrow that never ever as soon as failed to push me about the end line. That identical vision is what propels me to force for my staff and Veterans fighting for their life.”
Her contagious spirit and tale are a reminder that hurdles may come up, but it is how you bounce over every single a single that certainly counts.
As famously said, she emphasizes, “I seem at the glass fifty percent-complete. When we have a constructive frame of mind, we can transform matters all-around and jump over the hurdles life sites in entrance of us.”
A mindset so impressive with a enthusiasm to serve Veterans, it is only ideal to credit score her for Veterans leaving the ICU stronger than they arrived.