Miriam Allred (00:00)
Welcome everyone to the lab. We are live here in Austin, Texas, and I am joined by Jenny Johnson, the CEO of Heart of Gold Nursing. Jenny, thanks for being here and welcome to the lab.
Jenny Johnson (00:23)
Thank you for having me. I'm a long time listener and I've learned so much.
Miriam Allred (00:25)
from
you. You are the sweetest. Tell me how long you've been listening to the show.
Jenny Johnson (00:29)
Well before you were at the lab. Good few years back in the day, so yes.
Miriam Allred (00:34)
Okay, well this is such a treat for both of us to be live in Austin. I was just telling you, I interview a lot of people, but only so many people in person, so this is a real great experience for both of us. And we just got connected through Becky Reel, the sweetest. We did an Orange Theory class together, so we're feeling good physically and mentally and excited for this conversation. Let's go ahead and start with a little bit about your background. But in the form of storytelling, tell us about the personal event or events that led you to founding your home care company.
Jenny Johnson (01:05)
It was a very interesting, unique and traumatic experience for me well before I knew I was going to have a business. First of all, I'm a nurse of 25 years and literally thought I would retire in a hospital. I love nursing that much. I was in fifth grade dissecting a cow's eyeball and that is my story. And that's when I knew I was going to be a nurse. But in 2016, I had a seven year old daughter who went to bed. We're going to say normal child air quotes around that, but high functioning child.
Woke up the next day, pretty much non-functioning. ⁓ She was bordering everything on the walls, urinating and defecating all over the house, refusing to swallow, therefore not eating or drinking much, ⁓ would not step on cracks. To leave the house, we had to go through the front door. We literally had to carry her over thresholds. She refused to walk through doors. So immediately got her into therapy. We're trying to figure out what the heck happened to her, but she... ⁓
Literally had massive OCD within eight weeks. She was admitted to the UCLA Psych kids program only could come home on weekends for intensive therapy and it turns out she had
Lyme disease, but we did not know that. When we got to UCLA, of course, my husband at the time and I were traumatized by what we were seeing, and they just told me literally, quote unquote, your kid will be a mental cripple. they literally, I remember so clearly when they handed over her psych pills, and this was going to be our story. ⁓
That is prefacing a little bit about how it unfolded. The reason why it's important is because I'm the one who figured out she had Lyme disease. They painted this picture. They definitely helped her with a cognitive behavioral therapy. But it would not sit well with me that my kid was going to be on psych meds for the rest of her life without due diligence and figuring out what happened to her. So she was there for 13 weeks. But I was doing my little detective work behind the scenes. I always say Facebook actually saved my kid's life because I found other moms who went through what I did.
⁓ And that is how I found the diagnosis through other moms.
Miriam Allred (03:09)
and you were a nurse. So one might think that you were better equipped to handle a situation like this. Do you feel like you were or being the mom in the situation made it hard regardless?
Jenny Johnson (03:23)
Looking back, was a mom on a mission. That was it. ⁓ I probably...
could have used my nurse skills then, but I mean, I didn't know anything about mental health. That was not my specialty. I did not know anything about Lyme disease. In fact, I was shocked when she came back positive for it. But when you're on a mom on a mission and you have a kid that's sick, you will figure it out. ⁓ I just did a lot of research on the lab work that was being done on her and to convince doctors to get the lab work done, by the way, that was another thing. People very much poo-pooed my ideas, but I wanted to figure out what happened to her. ⁓ So when we got the Lyme results back, the way Western medicine looks at Lyme is very different ⁓
Lyme results. So I had to do a lot of sleuth detector work to figure out like what these results meant. ⁓ Found a actual Lyme disease doctor, doing my detective work there to figure it out, but yes he officially diagnosed her. But very non-traditional ways.
Miriam Allred (04:11)
And so leading up to this, were working in the hospital as a nurse. Did you have to put your whole life on pause or were you still working shifts as a nurse while this was unfolding?
Jenny Johnson (04:21)
9 p.m. that night ⁓ my kid's dad called me and said you need to get home. I can't manage her. She's trying to escape the house with knives. That's the truth. And he was weeping. He was scared. Yeah, so I literally left the hospital that day in 2016.
Miriam Allred (04:35)
And quit your job. Quit your job. And put your nursing on pause. But like you said, you love it and you were doing it for so many years and you saw like this was the rest of your life. But here in a moment, blink of an eye, everything changed. So we're going to kind of fast forward a little bit. There's a lot to unpack with your daughter's journey. And I guess I even want to just say to this audience listening, like.
Lyme's disease is not super common or super talked about. And so if anyone even listening to this has thoughts or questions about it, you are now kind of a resource in that regard. But to fast forward, ⁓ you start a home care company amidst all of this going on, at what point in time did you decide we're gonna start a business?
Jenny Johnson (05:10)
Ha.
Yeah, that was in 2020. So she took about a year to get better, but she did. So super grateful. I always just say I was just sprinkling in nursing at this point. I didn't want to go back to the hospital to have our shifts. So I was doing like home IV infusions. I was doing ⁓ some urgent care work, just very easy stuff while I was now homeschooling my child. ⁓
I had the opportunity to take care of a gentleman who had a lot of wealth, and I say that because he had round the clock nursing care. And he found me through word of mouth. I recruited my ICU nurse friends, and we took care of this gentleman 24-7 as RNs. And I...
I like, I didn't know this existed. I love the freedom ⁓ and I love the income that came with that freedom because I always said I have to know I can always take care of my kid again. So I started it as a private duty nursing firm and I focused on plastic surgery. After he passed away, focused on the plastic surgery side of it and then it was just me doing about eight to 10 shifts a month.
Miriam Allred (06:17)
then at what point did it turn into a business? He employed you and you were kind of a contract worker, correct? You weren't working under a hospital brand of any sort?
Jenny Johnson (06:26)
It was actually just all through me. I mean, just on the side. And he liked what we did. But what was happening, I actually did turn it officially into a business while that was going on, because I really loved the model. But I started getting calls for home care. I had some internet traction going on. I think I'd gotten some reviews. And I would just literally Google quickly some agencies in my area and send them off. Well, I also quickly realized I was getting a little more entrepreneurial savvy. And I thought, wait, people don't need nurses long term. They would need like,
like home care, you know. So from the entrepreneurial lens, I thought, ⁓ okay, I can be making an income actually while I'm sleeping, because it was officially relying on me most of the time to do the plastic surgery recovery. ⁓ And so then we brought in home care.
