Over the course of a nursing career that started in the 1970’s, Roxy Boysen learned quickly that the job can not only be tough, but traumatic.
Nurses as well as all other healthcare and medical professionals routinely see very difficult scenes — child abuse, spousal abuse, elder abuse, and addictions of all kinds, especially alcohol and increasingly, addictions to prescribed and illegal drugs.
There is a name for the trauma that it can cause a care provider, yet few in the medical field, or any career where one might witness or work with individuals who have experienced trauma (domestic violence shelter, child abuse investigators, prosecutors, judges, therapists, health care professionals, animal shelter workers, etc), seem to know it is real or that it can have a lasting and potentially damaging effect on them.
Boysen decided to do something about it.
The LPN went back to school for her RN degree. She became a licensed educator in the College of Nursing at SDSU. She reached out wherever she could to help others cope, both about trauma and its impact on medical professionals, and on death and dying as well.

She became a speaker on the subject of vicarious trauma and how to cope. She also was trained and licensed in the state as a Clinical Nurse Specialist with an expertise in diabetes, cardiovascular disease and thanatology (the study of dying and death).
Through all of this, in May of 2014, Boysen resigned from the College of Nursing to start her own nonprofit called Journey Home. She and four other professors created an interdisciplinary educational group that would educate healthcare professionals during a five-day conference using an End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium and a Respecting Choices Plan of Study.
Most recently, and as a result of all of her life and caregiving experience, she was asked to write five chapters of the latest rendition of the book “Loss, Grief and Bereavement”, which is available for Continuing Education credits for Nursing Professionals. Any health care professional however, she said, trying to learn to manage grief and loss for their patients or themselves, would most likely find the entire course helpful.
She knows she did, when she took the course herself years ago. The five chapters she was asked to author, she said, was an honor.
“If nurses are educated to the point they can just go up to a physician when someone is dying and say, ‘Can I just take over?’...because a lot of times physicians are taught curing, not caring. They’re taught from a totally different perspective. And if they don’t cure, they’ve failed. That’s so wrong. We can’t control when people die.”
Over the course of her career, she has held countless hands through that moment in time.
“I consider it an honor to be present when someone dies, even more honor than when a baby is born, because it’s more intimate when someone dies. And to be able to help the family through dying and death, documents, conversations, etc., it isn’t about us, it’s about this person you love. I consider it a dishonor to the patient and to the family when no one has prepared them that this person is dying and instead when youI walk in the room the family is fighting over whether to code or not code or anything else that hasn’t been discussed.”
Boysen pointed out that for those unable to take the class or read the book, she might leave them with two thoughts. First, if you are in a career where you routinely witness trauma, know that it could have a devastating impact on your own health if not addressed. Second, we also just passed this past month, National Healthcare Decisions Day. National Healthcare decisions day was started in 2008, April16, tax day, by Nathan Kottkamp, a lawyer practicing in Virginia. So that people would review their Medical Power of Attorney document. It is observed so that individuals and families document and make known to their health care professionals the kind of adequate care they wish to receive in any situation over the course of their life, and have those wishes respected and met.