She’s not only a nurse practitioner, but also writes, teaches, farms, and so much more.
Photo By Dan Smith
Judy Jenks has so many degrees and certifications that it’s a challenge to determine her courtesy title. Is she, for example, Dr. Nurse? She has a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) PhD as a nurse practitioner, but she isn’t an MD.
She is a business owner, an Appalachian culture writer and teacher, a professional who often testifies before the Virginia General Assembly on nurse practitioner and rural health issues, owner of a cannabis clinic, avid horsewoman, farmer and member of a championship pool (billiards) team.
She lives in the Radford home where she grew up with “a house full of boys” (three brothers, eventually a husband and a dad). Her mother taught her that as a woman, she had choices. “I’m not going to teach you how to clean up after a bunch of men,” Jenks said her mother emphasized.
When does she rest? “I haven’t stopped since I was 6,” she laughs. That was 57 years and eight college degrees ago. Her curriculum vitae is 23 pages long. Her grades in virtually all of her educational efforts are 4.0, perfect.
She treats sick patients and advocates for them, especially the ones who lack access to healthcare. She volunteers for overseas missions and combines her love of travel with the vital nursing she offers. To say that she follows her bliss is to offer up a giant understatement.
At a time when women’s professional career choices were nurse and teacher, “I didn’t want to be either” because of the stereotype. She wound up as both, at least partly because she comes from a long line of nurses. Her mom was a nurse and one of her sons is a doctor.
At 16, Jenks worked in a factory (Inland Motors), but she got enough of that pretty quickly and began her nursing education at New River Community College. She worked in Princeton, West Virginia, as a nurse for a while, but the 100-mile roundtrip daily was a bit much, so she found a nursing job closer to home and ultimately wound up with her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Radford University. By then, “I had both of my boys, and I had to take them with me” to school. She was managing four nursing units simultaneously at Pulaski Hospital.
After “five years of that, I wanted to be a chief nursing officer,” which required a master’s degree, so back to school she went. This time, the goal became a nurse practitioner designate. “I didn’t know what a nurse practitioner did when I started, but I took a leap of faith, and it turned out to be just what I wanted.”
She was attracted “to the autonomy. I could work more independently, make decisions without being subservient. I was paving the way as a nurse practitioner” and eventually she was on the state board of nurse practitioners, advocating against “those who wanted to push us back” and speaking to the health education community and often to the General Assembly, pushing nurse practitioner and rural health issues.
She taught at Jefferson College in Roanoke, taking a pay cut from clinic work, which led her to open businesses (including the cannabis gig). She earned her DNP Ph.D. from Radford in 2016 and had, by then, become a noted leader among nurse practitioners.
A post-grad certificate in Appalachian Studies came naturally to her, given her background. She “always found something attractive about my heritage. People often told me to get rid of my accent.” But she learned more than heritage with her new interest. “It was life-changing” to take courses in humanities and not the sciences.
“I had a week-long writing course at RU program,” she said, “and I’d been writing all my life, but never showed my writing to anybody. I didn’t think I had any talent.” Jim Minick, a Radford University writing professor, “said, ‘You have a voice’ and that was a profound moment for me. He was acknowledging that I could write.”
Meanwhile, Jenks has been jamming all she can into a packed life. She fell into the competitive pool competition, wound up in Las Vegas at a national tournament, and earned most valuable player at her skill level in the local league. “I don’t like being idle,” she said.
Her advocacy for rural health care has become a central focus. “I advocate for vulnerable populations’ access to health care,” she said. She volunteers at pop-up clinics (“We provided care in cow stalls”). She was working in Puerto Rico following a hurricane, on a Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota and at myriad other far-flung locations, fulfilling her desire to travel and to heal.
The current landscape for healthcare for the poor makes her “angry,” she said. “It is serious. There are a lot of threats and getting truthful information” is a challenge. “We have to reimagine health care because it is not working.”
The problem, she insists, “is not the providers.” She blames the cost of care, corporate medicine and the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. “When my nurse practitioner students graduate,” she said, “they will see a very different world than the one I have worked in.”
One of the reasons for the difference will be the efforts of a woman who can’t get too much education and who has used that to lead.
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