We’ve finally made it to May, and what an exciting week it’s been in the BSB fandom! A new BSB song with Rascal Flatts, a live performance on the ACM Awards, and an announcement about Nick’s long-awaited solo album, coming out next week!
This week, in honor of both Teacher Appreciation Week and National Nurses Week, I’m blogging about my favorite teacher and nurse characters. As a teacher myself, I love it when I have the rare opportunity to “write what I know” and include teacher characters and classroom scenes in my stories. If I wasn’t a teacher, I would probably be working somewhere in the healthcare field, so I have a healthy admiration for nurses as well and have included many of them in my stories over the years. Teachers and nurses are similar in a lot of ways. Traditionally female-dominated occupations, they both require patience, empathy, a nurturing personality, strong communication and problem-solving skills, and the ability to multitask and think on your feet. Despite the important role they play in our society, teachers and nurses tend to be disrespected, undervalued, and underpaid. So this post is dedicated to all the teachers and nurses out there. Special shout-out to school and medical support staff, too, including paraprofessionals, CNAs, technicians, orderlies, secretaries, custodians, cafeteria workers, and so forth. Anyone who’s worked in a school or clinical setting knows that these places would fall apart without all the important people who work together to keep them functioning well. Without further ado, here are my top five favorite teacher/nurse characters!
5. Becci Littrell (fourth grade teacher)
In Secrets of the Heart, Brian and his wife Becci are both teachers. Brian once said that he might have become a teacher if he wasn’t a Backstreet Boy, so I made him a music teacher in this alternate universe. It just made sense for me to make his wife a teacher as well. It gave me a backstory for how they might have met: they were both hired by the same district in the same year and bonded as they went through their first-year teacher mentoring program together. It also allowed me to weave some of my own real-life experience into the story. I started Secrets in the fall of 2008, when I was in my second year of teaching fourth grade. In fact, it was a particularly tough week at school that prompted me to start writing the story one weekend as a way to take my mind off of work – which is not an easy task for a young teacher. Brian and Becci’s teaching careers are not of particular importance to the overall plot of Secrets; in fact, Brian is on medical leave from work for most of the story, and there are only a couple of scenes that show Becci in the classroom, which are both in Chapter 3. But I can’t help smiling whenever I read that chapter because it’s so authentic to me. I even based the two students mentioned toward the beginning on students from my class that year. As a writer, I spend so much time trying to imagine what it would be like to be in my character’s shoes, but it wasn’t at all difficult to put myself in Becci’s place because, in many ways, I’ve been there. I’ve struggled to keep my composure in front of my students, forcing a smile onto my face when, deep down, all I wanted to do was cry. I’ve gone to school sick, tired, grieving, distracted, and taught through it all. Because what I wrote way back in 2008 still rings true today:
All teachers are, to some extent, actors and actresses. They feign enthusiasm over learning the rock cycle, the weekly spelling words, and long division, in hopes of inspiring genuine enthusiasm in their students. They pretend to like even the most unlikable of children, so as to boost their self-worth. They give “The Look” to the class clown, and their lips do not twitch, because even though they want to laugh too, they must be firm about their expectations for student behavior. They hide colds, teach through fevers and morning sickness, and give their directions charades-style when laryngitis claims their “teacher voice.” They claim to hate missing a day of school, but really, they just hate writing sub plans. On most days, they love what they do, but on the days they don’t, they still act as if they do. The classroom is their stage. They are teachers.
4. Jo Lopez (emergency room nurse)
It was important to Rose and me to include a character with medical training in our zombie apocalypse AU, Song for the Undead, so we created the character Jo and made her an ER nurse. We see the first phase of the deadly Osiris Virus pandemic through Jo’s eyes, as she deals with an emergency department that’s been decimated by illness and death. As the story unfolds, Jo’s medical expertise and ability to stay calm in a crisis become huge assets for our group of survivors. This is best exemplified by Chapter 69, in which she races to stop an injured Howie from bleeding to death – and discovers an important connection between the characters in the process. As the matriarch of the found family they form, Jo cares for the other characters in more ways than one, nurturing both their bodies and their souls. That’s what makes her a great nurse!
3. Gretchen Elliott (third grade teacher)
Gretchen is another one of the five female original characters created for Song for the Undead. Rose and I, along with our original co-writer Dee, each came up with a character who was loosely based on us. Riley was Rose’s character, Kayleigh was Dee’s, and Gretchen was mine. Although I changed many personal details to prevent her from being a pure self-insert (boring!), I kept our professions the same, making Gretchen an elementary school teacher like me. We started writing Song for the Undead the summer after I finished my first year of teaching, so I paid tribute to a few of the students from my first class in Chapter 4, which introduces Gretchen’s character. While not as essential as nurses, I figured teachers would also play an important role in the post-apocalyptic world. We see this in Chapter 112, in which Gretchen teaches the next generation about the pandemic that nearly ended the world. It’s crazy to think we finished Song for the Undead in 2015, five years before the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, COVID was nothing compared to the fictional Osiris Virus that wiped out over 99% of the world’s population in our story. One of the good things to come out of COVID, at least during the first few months of the pandemic when the schools shut down, was a renewed sense of appreciation for teachers, as parents realized that educating their kids isn’t actually as easy as the trained professionals make it appear. And they didn’t even have zombies to contend with! But, like most teachers, Gretchen is both a multitasker and a lifelong learner. She cooks most of the group’s meals, finding resourceful ways to utilize their meager food rations, and cultivates a vegetable garden to provide fresh food in the future. She cares for both kids and adults – and she kills zombies! After Jo’s death, Gretchen becomes the unofficial matriarch of the family, taking Jo’s daughter Gabby under her wing and trying her best to keep the rest of the group together, just as a teacher does with her class of students. She may not be the bravest, the boldest, or the most badass, but in the background, Gretchen’s quiet leadership keeps the wheels from falling off the bus.
2. Dani Henault (critical care nurse)
Dani from A Heart That Isn’t Mine is the most controversial character I included on this list. She’s not a good nurse – at least, not according to the standard notion that nurses are supposed to take care of their patients, not torture them. But no one can deny that she is a highly skilled nurse who’s good at what she does. The girl knows how to stop and restart a heart like nobody’s business! While I vastly inflated the success rate of CPR in this story for narrative purposes, I also made Dani intelligent, determined, and competent enough to pull off her crazy scheme. Of course, she’s also a sadist, a psychopath, and a sexual deviant. No chapter exemplifies both sides of her character better than Chapter 34, which remains the most disturbing thing I’ve written in the past twenty-five years. Dani’s multifaceted personality made her a complex and compelling character to write, which was a fun challenge for me after writing so many kind, decent female characters like the other ladies on this list. Who doesn’t love a villain? Or, in this case, villainess? That’s why Dani ranks so high on this list!
1. Cary Hilst (nurse practitioner)
As nurse characters go, Cary from Curtain Call is the complete opposite of Dani. While she doesn’t have Dani’s confidence, Cary is genuinely kind-hearted and compassionate, and she cares for Nick in every way she can. Her nurturing personality shines in scenes like the one in Chapter 32, in which she soothes Nick’s symptoms after a show. Cary’s the kind of person you want to see working in healthcare. She started her nursing career as a pediatric oncology nurse before obtaining an advanced degree and becoming a licensed nurse practitioner, at which point she transitioned to working with older adults in a nursing home. It takes a special type of person to work with elderly people or kids with cancer, and Cary is indeed special. She was number one on my list of favorite female characters, so it’s only natural that she ended up at the top of this list, too.
Once again, kudos to all the educators and healthcare workers out there! You have my utmost respect. I hope you’ve felt appreciated this week! I’ll be back in a couple more weeks with my next Throwback Thursday blog, which will feature some of my favorite medical scenes.