Shellie Wear, PMHNP-BC: My name is Shellie Wear, Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. So my nursing career, started in 2006. Initially, I was working in Burlington at Great River on a tele floor and I was actually recently divorced and I had my kids and we came to Carthage and a spot came open at the hospital. So I applied here, closer to my children. It was a big transition from like a bigger hospital to a small hospital, but there's actually a lot to be learned in a small hospital because you do a lot of things for yourself that you don't in a big hospital.

 So I have worked here. I've worked on the floor, I worked in ER, I've worked as house supervisor. I decided I was going to go back and do my Family Nurse Practitioner, which I did. I did my initial nursing, my Bachelor's at Blessing Rieman College of Nursing in Quincy University. And then when I went back for my Family Nurse Practitioner, I went to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Did that, started working at the Boeing Clinic,  with Jeff Leon doing family practice, and then I started volunteering on the Hancock County Addiction Coalition and saw this major desert of services for addiction and mental health in the region. So about that time, my Alma Mater, SIUE, started the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program. So I went back and did that.

I worked in restaurants and did like management and ended up having a falling out with one of the owners of the restaurant I was working with at the time. And I just sat down. I was like, what do I want to do with my life? And I've always been a caretaker  even as a little girl. So I decided to go to school for nursing.

I really believe in treating the whole person, and the whole person often includes the family, the community. I really want to get to know them and their history so that I can treat appropriately because it takes all of that, especially in mental health. You really have to know all the pieces in order to get the right diagnosis.

I love the small hospital, like the ability to take care of your community. The ability to have a little more one-on-one time. It's interesting because people are like, oh, well you see so much more in the bigger hospital. That maybe used to be true, but definitely it's not true anymore. After COVID, we stayed really busy here, with all kinds of stuff coming in through our ER. But you learn like how to do your own EKGs, how to give your own respiratory treatments because you don't have a cardiopulmonary department 24 hours a day. It's, it's a big difference. But it's interesting and there is something super gratifying about taking care of your own community.

 I love the small area. I actually grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.  Spent my summers in a tiny town of a Augusta here, about five or 600 people maybe,  every summer with my grandpa. Lived with him for a little while. So I enjoy the peacefulness of small area.  And like I love the family feeling of the small hospital. It, it is really a thing.

 So most of my spare time is devoted to my grandkids. I have three sons and a daughter, and three granddaughters and a grandson. They, two of the girls are babies. We've got a two month old and a five month old, then a teenager, a 14 year old girl. And then I've got a five year old grandson.

So we like to play in the mud and play army and build things. And I like to, we've got just a little bit of grassy property that I like to go hike. I just like to take some time in the outdoors. It is quite amazing what it does to just clear your brain.