Shawnee Mission Post: Brittney Hunter, pediatric nurse and marathon runner

By Leah Wankum

A lifelong pediatric nurse for the past 13 years, Brittney Hunter loves her work at Children’s Mercy. For her, the work is personal and fulfilling, especially because she had severe health problems as a small child. Through her own experiences, she learned the value of nurses and their direct role in children’s health.

Born and raised in Houston, Hunter earned her chemistry and nursing degrees at the University of Nebraska. Outside of work, her biggest passion is running and training for marathons. 

"I’ve had health problems my entire life. I had my first surgery when I was 18 months old and then developed some auto-immune issues when I was 9, and had to have my spleen removed when I was 10 years old.

I’ve had several surgeries, probably six or seven of them operated on. I have a lot of scars on my stomach. So when I was young, I just was always dealing with stuff like that. I thought I wanted to be a doctor and solve all the world’s problems in healthcare. And I was in college and I just kind of had an epiphany.

I started thinking about my experiences, and I was like, you know, I don’t even really feel like the doctors were a huge part of my experience. It was the nurses that I remember the most because I hung out with them, or they were with me all day in the hospital.

And so, it was like I got to experience what drove me to healthcare after switching my mind a little bit and deciding to be a nurse. It kind of validated everything for me and solidified it for me.

I just think that any type of challenge you have in your life or anything that you have that maybe isn’t ideal, it’s not really what happens to you; it’s how you choose to respond to it.

And so I think that if you can take any sort of challenge in your life or adversity or something like that and spin it a different way, you’re going to come out better and stronger on the other side because of it."

Read the full story via the Shawnee Mission Post

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