As an emergency room and stepdown nurse, I’ve seen firsthand how quickly a “simple” foodborne illness can spiral for the wrong patient — a toddler, an elderly parent, someone immunocompromised. So let’s break this down the way I’d want a friend to break it down for me.

What’s Actually Happening

The eggs were produced on two farms in Texas between June 6 and July 3, 2026, and distributed with sell-by or best-by dates between July 20 and August 17, 2026. They were sold at:

• Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana

• Brookshire Grocery stores in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Mississippi

• Various smaller retail and foodservice outlets

Brands affected include Kroger, Simple Truth, Brookshire’s, Country Morning, and Sunups — so this isn’t just one label to watch for.

How to Check Your Carton

Look at the side of your egg carton for the date-coding ink. Your eggs are part of the recall only if they have:

• Plant code P-1950 or 0840962, and

• A Julian Date between 157 and 184

If both of those match, don’t eat them — return the carton to your place of purchase for a full refund.

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Why Salmonella Enteritidis Matters

Most healthy adults who get salmonella will deal with a rough few days — fever, cramping, diarrhea (sometimes bloody), nausea, and vomiting. Unpleasant, but survivable.

The real concern is for:

• Young children

• Older adults

• Anyone with a weakened immune system (chemo, autoimmune conditions, transplant recipients, etc.)

In rare cases, the infection can move into the bloodstream and cause more serious complications like infected aneurysms, endocarditis, or arthritis. If someone in your household falls into a higher-risk group and develops symptoms after eating eggs from this batch, don’t wait it out — call their provider.

The Nurse Take

This is a great reminder of two things I harp on constantly:

1. Cook your eggs. Properly cooked eggs (yolk and white firm) kill salmonella. Runny yolks and homemade mayo/dressings are where risk goes up.

2. When in doubt, throw it out. A carton of eggs is not worth a hospital stay, especially for your littles or your elders.

No illnesses have been reported yet, per the company, but recalls like this move fast — checking your carton takes 30 seconds and could save you a very bad week.

Questions? You can reach Midwest Poultry Services directly at 574.405.9531 (Mon–Fri, 8am–4:30pm ET) or recallassistance@mpseggs.com.

Source: FDA.gov recall announcement

💛 If this kind of plain-language health breakdown is helpful to you, consider buying me a coffee — it helps me keep making content like this.

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I can picture the service. Worship still playing quiet under the message, the kind of moment where the room goes still because everyone feels it at the same time. The pastor said something about picking up your cross daily, not admiring it from a distance. My chest got tight. My eyes burned. I said amen like I meant it, because in that second, I did.

Monday I woke up and lived exactly like I had the Friday before.

That happened more times than I want to admit. Not because I didn’t believe. I believed plenty. I could tell you the verse, the sermon series, the worship set. What I didn’t have was the follow-through. I had been moved by truth so many times that being moved started to feel like the same thing as being changed. It isn’t. Not even close.

Feeling Isn’t the Same as Following

There’s a psychological term for what was actually happening in me — cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding two conflicting truths at once. I believed Christ was worth following completely. I was also living like He was worth admiring occasionally. Most people don’t resolve that tension by changing their life. It’s too costly. So instead, without ever deciding to, I quietly resized the calling until it fit the life I already had. Not “pick up your cross daily.” More like “think about your cross when it’s convenient, or when the sermon is good enough to make you cry.”

That’s the thing nobody tells you about spiritual comfort — you can attend, worship, cry, repost the verse, and still never move an inch. Comfort lets you feel faithful without ever having to be obedient. And feeling will always be easier than becoming, because feeling doesn’t cost you anything.

Coffee

What Obedience Actually Cost Me

The shift for me wasn’t a bigger emotional moment. It was smaller and much less comfortable than that. It was the week I actually put something down instead of just feeling convicted about it. It was choosing to stop performing a version of faith that looked good and start living one that actually required something of me — my time, my comfort, my plans for my own life. Luke 9:23 doesn’t say admire your cross. It says pick it up. Picking something up means your hands are no longer free for what they were holding before.

I wish I could say the moment I actually obeyed felt triumphant. It mostly felt inconvenient. That’s usually how you know it’s real.

Why I Started Sharing This Publicly

I didn’t start posting to build a platform. I started because I got tired of performing peace I didn’t have, in two different parts of my life, for two different audiences. The nurse who’s tired of a broken system and the woman who finally let conviction turn into obedience are not two separate people. They’re the same woman, finally telling the truth in both rooms at once.

What I’d Ask You

• What message has moved you recently that you still haven’t obeyed?

• Where have you mistaken feeling something for actually doing something about it?

• What would you have to put down — not feel bad about, actually put down — in order to pick up what you say you believe in?

Comfortable isn’t neutral. It’s a decision you make by default, over and over, until it becomes who you are. I’d rather be uncomfortable and obedient than moved and unchanged.

This is part two of a two-part series on comfort and complacency. Part one is about the same trap showing up at the bedside — read it here.

Last winter I had a patient fresh off a cath, new diagnosis, scared out of her mind, asking me questions I actually wanted to sit down and answer. What is this medication really doing. Why does my chest still feel tight. Is this going to happen again. I remember standing in that doorway doing the math in my head — six patients, four hours left in the shift, a med pass I was already behind on, a chart that wasn’t going to document itself. I gave her the two-minute version. I told her I’d come back. I didn’t come back, not really, not the way she needed. Someone else picked up where I left off, if anyone did at all.

That moment has stayed with me longer than almost anything else from that contract. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was normal. That’s what got me — how normal it was to leave someone under-taught, under-reassured, and technically “cared for” on paper.

I’ve been a nurse for seven years now, cardiac and emergency medicine, the last several as a travel nurse. On paper that’s a good career. Good pay, new cities every few months, a resume that looks impressive. What it actually became, most days, was a very well-compensated task list. Vitals, meds, charting, turn, repeat. Twelve hours of motion that often had very little to do with whether the person in that bed actually understood what was happening to their body.

I didn’t become a nurse to move fast through people. I became a nurse to teach them. To be the person who sits at the edge of the bed and explains what afib actually means for their life, not just what box needs to be checked before discharge. But the system isn’t built for that. It’s built for throughput. For metrics. For a version of “quality care” that has almost nothing to do with whether trust was built or fear was addressed.

Why This Doesn’t Feel Like an Emergency (And Why That’s the Problem)

Here’s the part that took me years to name. Burnout in healthcare doesn’t usually arrive as a crisis. It arrives as adaptation. Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation — the way humans acclimate to almost any environment, good or bad, until it simply becomes “normal.” You stop noticing the water is uncomfortable because you’ve been in it so long.

I wasn’t in crisis most days. I was regulated. Functional. Getting my tasks done, getting good reviews, moving to the next contract. And that’s exactly what made it dangerous — nothing about my day-to-day was alarming enough to make me stop and ask the real question: is this actually the care I want to give, or is this just the pace I got used to?

A broken system doesn’t need you to agree with it. It just needs you to keep functioning inside it long enough that functioning starts to feel like the same thing as thriving.

What I Actually Want

I don’t want less responsibility. I want a different kind of it. I want the time to teach, not just administer. I want to build the kind of rapport where a patient trusts me enough to actually tell me what’s going on, not just answer my assessment questions. That’s not a luxury add-on to nursing — that’s the actual job. Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that version of nursing was too slow to be profitable.

I’m not anti-travel nursing. I’m not walking away from the bedside. But I am done mistaking a full schedule for a full purpose. Those aren’t the same thing, and comfort is very good at convincing you they are.

What I’d Ask You

You don’t have to be a nurse for this to apply to you.

• Where in your work have you mistaken productive for purposeful?

• What would it look like to do your job the way you actually meant to, before the system trained you out of it?

• What’s one task today you could slow down for, on purpose, even though nobody would notice if you didn’t?

Comfortable isn’t safe. It’s just quiet. And quiet is easy to mistake for peace until you look back and realize how many people you moved past without really seeing.

This is part one of a two-part series on comfort and complacency. Part two is about the same trap showing up in my faith — read it here.

Go to community college, get your ADN, get hired at a hospital, and let them pay for your BSN.

That’s the cheat code.

There are no loans, no four years of tuition, and no contract tying you to a branch of the military or a decade of payback. It’s just you, working as a nurse and getting paid, while the hospital foots the bill for the rest of your degree through tuition reimbursement.

I didn’t know this existed.

Nobody in my family finished grade school. I’m the first person to even get a college degree, let alone a doctorate I’m currently finishing. When it came time to figure out how to pay for nursing school, there was no family playbook to hand down to me, no cousin who had done it before, and no one to say, “Here’s the smart way to do this.”

So I found my own way. I joined the Army to help pay for school.

And I mean this fully: I am grateful. The military gave me structure, discipline, and a path when I didn’t have one. It shaped who I am as a nurse and as a person. I wouldn’t trade that experience.

But I’d be lying if I said I never wonder. What would it have looked like if I’d known about the ADN route before I signed anything? Would I have less debt? Fewer years of my twenties committed to a contract? Would I have gotten to my BSN, and eventually this DNP, faster — with a hospital picking up the tab instead of me carrying it alone?

I’ll never know for sure. But I know this: someone reading this doesn’t have to wonder the same thing.

Here’s the route, broken down simply:

1. Go to community college and get your Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN). It’s faster and dramatically cheaper than a 4-year BSN program.

2. Pass your boards and get hired at a hospital as an RN. Most hospitals hire ADN nurses, especially with tuition reimbursement programs designed to move you toward your BSN anyway.

3. Use your hospital’s tuition reimbursement or loan forgiveness program to complete your BSN — while you’re already working, already earning a nurse’s salary, already building experience.

You come out the other side with a BSN, real hospital experience, and none of the crushing debt that so many nursing students carry for a decade after graduation.

This isn’t a knock on the traditional 4-year path, and it’s definitely not a knock on the military — for a lot of people, both are exactly right. But if you’re a first-generation student, if nobody in your family has walked this road before, if you’re trying to figure out how to become a nurse without going broke or without feeling like the military is your only way through — I want you to know this option exists.

I found my way to nursing. I’m proud of the nurse and the officer I became. But I also believe part of why I do this — why I share what I know, out loud, in public — is so the next first-gen girl trying to figure this out doesn’t have to build the whole map from scratch like I did.

You don’t need generational wealth to become a nurse. You need information nobody gave you.

Consider this me giving it to you.

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If you’re new here, this is where i’m documenting the journey of becoming. Not the highlight reel version. The actual one — faith, nursing, discipline, and everything in between.

A little about me: I’m a emergency medicine and cardiac nurse with almost seven years of experience, six of those spent travel nursing across the country. i’m also an army officer (commissioned after starting out enlisted), I’m finishing my DNP with my doctoral project as the last stretch, and I’m currently studying for my ANCC certification. Outside of the hospital, you’ll find me training for Hyrox, at church on Sundays, or building OmniSoul — a women’s activewear brand rooted in modesty, faith, and discipline.

I’m first-gen, raised by immigrant parents, bilingual, and my faith isn’t a side note in my life — it’s the foundation. Jesus es Rey. Everything else — the nursing, the military, the fitness, the brand — gets built on top of that.

Here’s what you can expect from this newsletter:

• Faith — real talk on scripture, myths we’ve been taught that don’t hold up, and what it actually looks like to walk this out day to day

• Nursing — clinical tips, lessons from the bedside, and the realities of travel nursing and military nursing that nobody tells you about

• Becoming her — the unglamorous middle of transformation: Hyrox training, discipline, identity, and building a life on purpose

• Behing OmniSoul — the founder journey, the wins, the mess, the why

If any part of that resonates, you’re in the right place. subscribe, and let’s do this together.