The little girl who wanted to stop and help

Jenny's path to nursing began at around age six or seven, when her family drove past a serious road accident. Emergency services had not yet arrived. People covered in blood were wandering aimlessly, looking for help. Jenny begged her father to stop the car. He kept driving.

Watching through the back window of the car, she made a quiet and fierce decision. She was going to be a doctor or a nurse, and she was going to stop and help people.

Her mother, reflecting the cultural norms of the time, told her she probably was not smart enough to be a doctor but could certainly be a nurse. That belief, absorbed at six years old, shaped decades of her sense of self. It was only much later that Jenny began to see that limitation for what it actually was: someone else's programming, passed down without malice, but passed down nonetheless.

The phone call that changed everything

Enjoying her retirement and travelling the world with her husband, Jenny began to feel unwell one day and recognised, with her nurse's instincts, that something serious was happening. She presented to hospital expecting a stroke. What they found was worse.

The tumour was in a particularly dangerous location, wrapped around the carotid artery. The first specialist she saw refused to operate, calculating that she would likely die on the table. The second, a younger surgeon at the top of his field with a reputation for groundbreaking techniques, was willing to try, as long as Jenny accepted the risks.

Her options were do nothing and die, or take a chance and possibly die. The choice, she says, did not take long.

"Part of the problem of being a nurse is you know too much."

She signed the consent that day. Then came the waiting, over Christmas, with the phone beside her at all times, wondering if every call would be the one summoning her to theatre.

Waking up in someone else's life

The surgery worked. And then the real journey began.

Jenny woke from a coma tied to the bed, having become what she describes, with characteristic dry humour, as the patient from hell. Her brain was swelling. She was disoriented and confused. She could not speak clearly, could not walk, and did not recognise the man standing at the end of her bed, her husband of thirty years.

The nurse part of her brain remained functional. She recognised the ICU, the sounds, the smells, the equipment. But the Jenny part, the memories, the relationships, the entire lived life, was gone.

What followed was a year of slow, painstaking rebuilding. Learning to walk. Relearning to speak through writing first, with the support of a speech pathologist who encouraged her to put words on paper when they would not come through her mouth. Rediscovering, piece by piece, a life she could not remember.

A clean slate and a writing spark

It was her speech pathologist who first pointed Jenny toward writing. The words she could not speak, she could write. And somewhere in that process, something shifted.

With no prior interest in writing and no memory of her old hobbies, Jenny gave herself permission to dream the way a child does, without limits and without expectation. She took online self-paced writing courses during her rehabilitation, learning the craft of fiction from the beginning. She began with a sentence. That sentence felt like a major accomplishment.

The Triggering Scent, her debut medical thriller and the first in a series, grew from everything she knew. A nurse protagonist who survives brain surgery but returns to an ICU setting with memory loss, speech difficulties, and a growing awareness that the surgeon who operated on her is now working in her hospital. The scent that triggers her memory, drawn directly from Jenny's own experience of her smell becoming acute after surgery, sets the whole story in motion.

"Some things got turned off, some things got turned on. Clearly this is the path I should be on."

The marriage they are rebuilding from scratch

One of the most quietly moving parts of this conversation is Jenny's account of her relationship with her husband. He sat at her bedside through it all. He never left. And she did not know who he was.

The couple made a practical and courageous decision: to start again. To date, to get to know each other, to build something new rather than grieve endlessly for the thirty years that exist only in his memory. It is taking a toll on them both. But they are still there, still trying, one day at a time.

Jenny reflects on the experience with the same openness she brings to everything. She cannot remember her own wedding. Driving home from a family event recently, she realised it was simply gone. Her husband talked her through it, what she wore, who was there, what they ate. The memory did not return. But something else was built in the telling of it.

The lesson she wishes she had known earlier

When Megan asks for the one truth Jenny wishes she had known earlier, her answer ties the whole conversation together beautifully. It is okay to challenge the paradigms we are taught.

From the moment a child starts school, the capacity to dream and imagine and create is gradually narrowed by the demand to focus, to follow a path, to answer the question of what you want to be. Jenny received a version of that narrowing from her own mother at six years old. And she carried it for decades.

The brain tumour removed that programming entirely. And in the space it left behind, something unexpected grew.

If Jenny's story resonates with you, this episode is a reminder that reinvention is not only possible after devastating loss. Sometimes it is exactly what loss makes room for. Listen in, and let Jenny remind you that the clean slate you might be afraid of could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

I'm Megan North, an Intuitive Purpose Finder here to guide you on the journey to Finding Your True North. Together, we'll uncover your soul's purpose, break free from limiting patterns, and align with your most authentic self. Through empowering insights, practical tools, and spiritual guidance, I'll help you create a life filled with meaning and possibility. Subscribe now and let's embark on this transformational journey to discover your true north and live the life you were meant for.

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