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I could not have picked two better people to help me with this conversation—Kim, a mental health professional, and Sammie, a medical professional who walks beside families in their hardest moments.

Kim has a master’s in counseling and a bachelor’s in psychology. She worked in the school system for 10 years, including in the Sandy Hook district, where she developed a deep understanding of PTSD and secondary trauma. She also brings powerful lived experience—spending a year in the hospital with her daughter Quinn, and surviving the loss of both Quinn and her twin sister Amelia due to complications from prematurity and BPD. Now, Kim is a certified life coach for children and adults and has started kindmindscoaching

She says, “I’m a lifelong learner. I love learning about the brain, mental health, coping, resiliency, and emotional intelligence.”

Nurse Sammie is a pediatric ICU nurse who has witnessed trauma daily and is trained in therapeutic crisis intervention (TCI). She shares what it’s like to navigate traumatic events on the job, and how mental health awareness and connection with families is essential to her role.

This episode is about the emotional aftermath of long hospital stays with your child, ICU life, and child loss. When the alarms stop and the chaos fades, many parents are left carrying trauma they weren’t expecting and are unequipped for.

When you’ve spent months watching monitors more than sleeping, your nervous system doesn’t just bounce back. Anxiety, anger, numbness, hypervigilance..it’s more common than people think, and for many of us, it hits after going home, when the world assumes we’re “okay now.”

We talk about the power of real connection. Of being seen. Of tiny moments of validation, and how mental health care needs to rise to meet the weight of what ICU parents carry.

We also explore the frustration of not being listened to as a parent—and how impossible it feels when someone asks, “What do you need?” and you honestly don’t know. We talk about what trauma looks like after survival and what healing can look like, too.