The Relentless School Nurse: When the Healer Is Inside the Story – A Nurse’s Experience of the California Wildfires

The New Jersey Collaborating Center for Nursing (NJCCN) – the nursing workforce center for NJ – presents the Nursing Insights podcast.Author’s Note: Before listening to Donna Gaffney’s moving and deeply personal podcast, it is helpful to know that she speaks candidly about trauma, disaster, displacement, and survivor’s guilt during the California wildfires. These moments are shared with care and reflection, but they may be emotionally difficult for some listeners. I encourage you to listen when you have the space to take in the story.

Some conversations stay with you long after they end. That was my experience listening to my friend and colleague Donna Gaffney, an advanced practice nurse and psychotherapist, share her story on the New Jersey Collaborating Center for Nursing’s Nursing Insights podcast. In the episode, Donna reflects on what it meant to find herself living through the January 2025 California wildfires after spending much of her professional life helping others navigate trauma.

When the Healer Is Wounded: A Nurse’s Story from the California Wildfires.

Donna has spent much of her professional life helping others make sense of trauma. As a nurse psychotherapist and psychiatric mental health clinical nurse specialist, she has supported children, families, nurses, and communities through some of the most devastating events of the past several decades, including the emotional aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode, however, the story shifts. Donna is no longer speaking solely as the clinician helping others process trauma. She is speaking as someone who found herself living through it.

On January 7, 2025, wildfires swept through parts of California, including the Pacific Palisades community where Donna lives. In the podcast, she recounts the moment she realized she needed to evacuate, the shock of displacement, and the emotional weight that followed. She speaks about returning to a neighborhood transformed by fire and about the complicated experience of survivor’s guilt that can emerge even when a home remains standing.

During the conversation, Donna introduces a concept from trauma scholarship known as shared traumatic reality. The phrase describes situations in which helpers and the people they serve are living through the same disaster at the same time. The distance that normally separates the clinician from the community collapses. The professional instincts to steady others remain, but the ground beneath those instincts is shifting as well.

For those of us in helping professions, that idea resonates deeply. We often imagine trauma work as something that happens at a certain remove, where the clinician bears witness to suffering but is not directly inside the event itself. Disasters like wildfires, pandemics, and other community crises remind us that this boundary is sometimes more fragile than we realize. The healer may also be navigating the same uncertainty, disruption, and loss.

Listening to Donna reflect on that experience gives the phrase wounded healer a much more literal meaning.

What struck me most about the episode was the honesty with which she tells the story. There is no rush toward a tidy conclusion. Instead, she allows the experience to unfold with all the complexity that trauma often carries. She speaks openly about survivor’s guilt, about the emotional toll of displacement, and about the ways even seasoned trauma professionals can feel destabilized when the crisis becomes personal.

At one point in the episode, Donna mentioned a conversation she and I had in the early days after the fires. Hearing that moment reflected back through her story took me by surprise. Reaching out to her at that time required some vulnerability on my part because I was very aware that she was in the middle of something deeply personal and still unfolding. I remember wondering whether I might be overstepping. At the same time, I trusted the instinct that sometimes a thoughtful reflection from a colleague can offer a small point of orientation when the ground feels uncertain. My hope was simply that something from that exchange might prove helpful as she navigated what were clearly uncharted waters.

The conversation in this episode is not a story about overcoming trauma or arriving neatly on the other side of it. It is something more meaningful than that. It is an honest reflection on what happens when someone whose life’s work has centered on helping others process trauma suddenly finds herself moving through that landscape personally.

For nurses, therapists, and anyone working in the helping professions, Donna’s reflections are worth listening to. They remind us that vulnerability is not a weakness in healing work. It is part of the human ground we all stand on.

I encourage you to listen to this episode of Nursing Insights. Donna’s story offers something rare: a thoughtful window into what it means when the healer is also living inside the storm.

Donna Gaffney, DNSc, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN, is a nurse psychotherapist, author, and nationally respected voice in trauma-informed care. For decades, she has supported children, families, nurses, and communities navigating the emotional aftermath of crisis and disaster. She is the author of Courageous Well-Being for Nurses: Strategies for Renewal.