As promised, The Relentless School Nurse Blog will continue featuring guest bloggers who share their stories, experiences, and perspectives.
Our next guest blogger is Holly Giovi, who came to know Robin through their work together in her online support group. I hope you’ll enjoy Holly’s heartfelt contribution and the message it brings.
If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger for The Relentless School Nurse Blog, we would love to hear from you. Please complete the guest blogger interest form, we welcome stories that inspire, educate, and support our school nursing community.
Continuing Robin’s mission with love,
Eileen Gavin
Renew Your License, Renew Your Life!
Honoring Robin Cogan and Finally Taking Her Advice
By Holly Giovi, RN
I have started this blog more times than I can count because every version feels too small for the person I am writing about.So let me say it plainly: Robin Cogan is no longer here to write the next post, and school nursing feels different without her in it.
For twenty-five years, Robin served as a school nurse in the Camden City School District, across the kind of chaotic, sacred health offices school nurses know so well. She trained in art therapy and spent years in psychiatric nursing before entering school nursing, and you could feel that whole-person lens in everything she did afterward.
In 2017, she began writing as The Relentless School Nurse. By the spring of 2026, she had published more than 1,400 posts, showing up on the page with the same consistency and purpose she brought to her practice.
On June 11, only weeks after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, Robin passed away at age 65, surrounded by her family. The speed of it remains difficult to comprehend. Just weeks earlier, she was still writing to us.
Her family has asked this community to help carry the blog forward, to keep telling the stories, keep the advocacy alive, and keep being relentless, whatever that looks like for each of us.
I cannot fill the space Robin leaves behind. None of us can. But I can do what she continually asked nurses to do: pay attention, tell the truth, and show up.
As I try to show up the way Robin taught us, I keep returning to one phrase: renew your license, renew your life.
The Struggle
In one of her final and most personal posts, published April 30, Robin wrote about something many nurses experience and few say plainly. She had skipped a week of writing, something highly unusual after more than 1,400 posts, because she had hit a wall. She wrote:
“It is hard to stay passionate about a profession that doesn’t always celebrate you. Some days, some whole seasons, it all feels like a slog.”
Robin did not dress it up. She did not turn exhaustion into an inspirational performance. She told the truth.
School nurses give so much of themselves to students, families, staff members, and systems that do not always understand the complexity or cost of the work. We carry emergencies, care plans, staffing gaps, documentation, parent concerns, policy failures, and relentless advocacy. Then we go home and try to become available to everyone waiting for us there.
Robin understood that the silence nurses keep about their own exhaustion is part of what allows the profession to keep undervaluing them. When we make depletion look effortless, systems begin to mistake it for sustainability.
Robin also wrote about why she kept coming back. It was for the child who walked into the health office not because they were sick, but because they knew the nurse would be there.
It was for the child who needed one trusted adult to slow down, ask the question that really mattered, and wait long enough to hear the honest answer.
That child knew nothing about the burdens the nurse carried or the struggles she faced behind the scenes. The child only knew one thing: whether someone showed up.
Robin always did!
Robin showed up for twenty-five years. But her message was never that nurses should push endlessly without rest. Sometimes showing up means caring for a student. Sometimes it means telling another nurse the truth. Sometimes it means taking a day, asking for help, and refusing to pretend you are fine.
Renew Your License. Renew Your Life!
We all understand the rhythm of professional renewal.
Complete the continuing education. Submit the paperwork. Track the deadlines. Provide proof that you remain prepared and qualified to care for other people.
Robin’s writing repeatedly challenged us to consider how rarely we apply that same discipline to ourselves.
We chase down every student’s overdue immunization while letting our own physical slide another year. We notice subtle changes in a child’s color, energy, gait, breathing, mood, or behavior, then ignore what our own body has been trying to tell us for months.
We follow up on everyone else’s referrals, specialist appointments, medication orders, and screening results while leaving our own unopened in a patient portal. We treat professional renewal as nonnegotiable and personal renewal as something we will get to when everyone else stops needing us.
Everyone else is not going to stop needing us. We have to place ourselves back on the list.
This Is Not About Blame
This piece is not an attempt to explain Robin’s death or turn her into a lesson about cancer. Her illness moved quickly, and her diagnosis should never be used to look backward and ask what she “should” have noticed or done differently.
Illness is not evidence of failed self-care, and a diagnosis is not a judgment on how well someone cared for themselves. Screenings are important, but they are not promises; no one can make the human body fully predictable.
Robin should not be reduced to a warning. She was not responsible for making her illness easier for the rest of us to understand.
The lesson comes from the words she intentionally left behind about exhaustion, boundaries, honesty, connection, and caring for our own hearts. In a 2025 post about caring for ourselves in a sudden world, Robin urged school nurses to acknowledge the emotional weight of the work, seek support, and set boundaries that protect us from emotional exhaustion.
She ended with this:
“Take care of yourselves, take care of others, and above all, take care of your hearts.”
We should listen!
Put Yourself Back on the Schedule: If you are wondering what “renew your life” looks like on a Tuesday, start here.
Book the physical you have been postponing. Ask your healthcare provider which screenings and follow-up care are appropriate for your age, history, symptoms, and individual risk.
Open the results. Return the call. Refill your own prescription before it becomes urgent. Stop explaining away a symptom simply because you are busy.
Take the mental health day without building a legal defense for needing one. Tell another nurse the true answer when they ask how you are doing.
Use qualified coverage when it exists. When it does not, document the gap and advocate for protected time rather than pretending the current arrangement is sustainable.
Drink the water. Eat your lunch. Leave on time when you can. Rest before your body forces the decision.
None of these actions guarantees that illness, grief, or loss will stay away. That is not the point. These are not steps for preventing every bad outcome; they are ways of participating in your own care and honoring Robin’s legacy without turning her death into a warning.
You deserve care even when no student, family member, colleague, or administrator is waiting for you to return to work.
The Chief Wellness Officer Starts with You!
Robin insisted that school nurses are the Chief Wellness Officers of their schools. It was not a decorative title. It was a demand for professional ownership and recognition.
She even had pins made, a small robin on a branch, with a nurse’s cross, and carried them to conferences across the country. She pressed them into the hands of school nurses she had just met because she wanted us to claim the role. One nurse in Kansas introduced herself as the Chief Wellness Officer before Robin even had the chance to say the words.
If you are holding your pin right now, or you know exactly which drawer it is in, you already understand what she meant.
School nurses see how health affects attendance, learning, behavior, safety, family stability, and the functioning of an entire school community. We notice patterns before many systems recognize they exist. We belong at decision-making tables because our work gives us a view of the whole building that few others have.
Robin modeled that leadership through her writing, teaching, advocacy, testimony, and her work preparing future school nurses at Rutgers University-Camden.
But if you are the Chief Wellness Officer, the role includes you.
You cannot advocate for prevention while continually postponing your own. You cannot teach children to listen to their bodies while treating your own body as an inconvenience or the last thing on your list.
Caring for yourself does not weaken your commitment to students. It protects the person doing the committing.
Renewing the Profession Means Renewing Its Nurses
Shortly before her death, Robin wrote:
Sustaining school nursing requires more than policies, certifications, conferences, and position statements. It requires nurses who are still working, still curious, still willing to tell the truth about unsafe workloads, and still able to ask for help before a crisis forces them to.
It requires nurses who understand that rest is not proof of insufficient dedication. It requires us to protect the next generation from inheriting a professional culture that celebrates sacrifice while ignoring the person being sacrificed.
Robin taught us to use our voices for students, families, public health, safety, equity, and the profession itself.
Perhaps one way to honor her now is to use those voices for ourselves too.
Be Relentless, Whatever That Means Today
Robin Cogan is Camden’s loss, school nursing’s loss, and a personal loss for the thousands of nurses who read her work, learned from her, and carried her words into their own health offices.
She leaves behind her husband, her daughters, her granddaughter, family and friends who loved her, and a body of work that will continue to shape school nursing through the people she taught, mentored, challenged, and inspired.
She also leaves behind the words that welcomed readers to this blog:
“Be relentless in your practice, whatever it is.”
Being relentless does not always mean doing more.
Sometimes it means making the appointment. Sometimes it means going home. Sometimes it means admitting the workload is not sustainable. Sometimes it means asking someone to sit beside you. Sometimes it means refusing to disappear inside the work you love.
So renew your license. Then, in whatever ways are possible for you right now, renew your life right alongside it.
Not because Robin’s death needs to be made into a warning, but because her life gave us permission to tell the truth about what this work costs and what nurses need in order to continue doing it.
Robin spent twenty-five years showing us what committed practice looks like. Let us honor that commitment by refusing to treat our own health and humanity as separate from the work.
Be relentless in your practice, including the practice of taking care of yourself.
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Thank you for continuing Robin’s legacy.