Contributor – Jodi Clee Kennedy, MSN, RN, AGACNP
TWU PhD Student

I opened my eyes at 7:00 a.m. to a heart rate of 130 beats per minute. I had committed to a dress rehearsal at noon for my Active Older Adult group at the YMCA. I couldn’t miss it.

For three weeks leading up to the event, I had been experiencing increasing anxiety, sweating, difficulty swallowing, weight loss, and persistent heart palpitations. I convinced myself it was performance anxiety and decided to push through. After stumbling through rehearsal, I drove straight to urgent care.

“Can I please get an EKG to make sure I don’t have any abnormalities?”

“We don’t normally do that here,” they replied, “but I guess we can make an exception.”

After three abnormal EKGs, they suggested I go to the emergency room. I rushed home, picked up my kids, and waited for my mom to drive two hours to help. Once she arrived, I drove to a large hospital with a cardiologist on call—just in case something was actually wrong with my heart.

In the waiting room, I handed over my abnormal EKGs and explained my symptoms. Shortly after, a younger African American man walked in with chest pain and was immediately taken back. Fifteen minutes later, he jovially walked out after receiving morphine.

I’m allergic to morphine.

I continued to wait.

Five and a half hours later, I was placed in a hallway bed. Around midnight, the ER physician approached me.

“Your troponins were both negative. Do you have any questions?”

Yes, I had questions.

“Why do I feel this way? My heart hurts. My chest hurts. I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin. I’ve never had anxiety like this.”

“You’re too young to be having a blockage,” he replied. “Would you like propranolol to lower your heart rate?”

No thanks.

I threw my half-eaten turkey sandwich into the trash and walked out of the emergency department.

Later, I discovered I had serotonin syndrome. No one at urgent care or the emergency department had asked what medications I was taking. My symptoms were dismissed. My concerns were minimized. My experience was reframed as anxiety.

I was young.
I was female.
I was not heard.

Experiences like this are not isolated, and research shows that women of color, particularly Black women, face even greater risks of having their symptoms dismissed, contributing to delayed diagnosis and serious health outcomes (Canty, 2022).

This experience shifted how I understand Peggy Chinn’s Peace and Power Nursing theory—not as an abstract concept, but as something that directly shapes patient safety and voice.

Peace and Power Nursing: Listening as Shared Power

Peggy Chinn’s Peace and Power Nursing Theory emphasizes relationships grounded in respect, voice, and shared power. Rather than positioning healthcare providers as authorities and patients as passive recipients, Peace and Power Nursing calls for authentic partnership. Patients are experts in their own lived experiences.

In my situation, the most important clinical question was never asked:
“What medications are you currently taking?”

That single question could have changed everything. Instead, assumptions shaped my care. My tachycardia became anxiety. My chest pain became stress. My distress became something to manage rather than something to investigate. My voice, though present, did not carry weight in the clinical encounter.

Peace and Power Nursing reminds us that power in healthcare is not held over patients but created through relationship. When nurses listen deeply, ask open questions, and validate patient experiences, power is shared. When we fail to listen, power becomes hierarchical, critical information is missed, and patient safety is placed at risk.

Serotonin syndrome is a medical emergency, yet my symptoms were filtered through assumptions about age, gender, and anxiety. Once labeled as anxious, every symptom became evidence supporting that label. The clinical lens narrowed, and opportunities for discovery were missed.

Peace and Power Nursing challenges this pattern. It invites nurses to remain curious rather than certain, collaborative rather than authoritative, and to create space for patients to tell their stories fully. As a nurse, I have asked countless patients about their medications. As a patient, I experienced what happens when that step is skipped. The difference was not just clinical—it was human. I felt dismissed, unheard, and alone, with a sense of impending doom.

Reclaiming Power Through Partnership

This experience changed how I think about nursing presence. Peace and Power Nursing is enacted in simple, everyday moments: sitting down instead of standing over a patient, asking “What worries you most?”, listening without interrupting, and recognizing patients as partners in understanding.

When nurses create space for voice, patients feel safer sharing details that may change clinical decisions. When power is shared, care becomes collaborative rather than prescriptive. In my case, I ultimately had to advocate for myself outside the system. Not every patient has the knowledge, confidence, or resources to do so. Peace and Power Nursing calls us to ensure patients do not have to fight to be heard.

This experience left me with questions I now carry into practice: Did I truly listen? Did I assume anxiety too quickly? Did I ask about medications? Did I create space for partnership? Did I share power, or did I hold it?

Peace in healthcare begins with listening. Power emerges when patients are invited into the conversation. When nurses lead with both, patients are heard, validated, and supported.

Because sometimes the patient sitting quietly in the waiting room is not anxious. Sometimes she is not overreacting. Sometimes she is experiencing a medical emergency. And sometimes she is a nurse—learning firsthand the importance of peace, power, and the simple act of listening.

Sources

Canty, L. (2022). The lived experience of severe maternal morbidity among Black women. Nursing Inquiry, 29(1), e12466. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12466

Chinn, P. L. (2018). Peace and power: Transforming relationships in nursing (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

About Jodi Clee Kennedy, MSN, RN, AGACNP

Jodi Clee Kennedy is a PhD student in Nursing Science at Texas Woman’s University, where her scholarship focuses on resilience, identity reconstruction, and the lived experience of widowhood. Her dissertation work explores mirror-viewing experiences among older widowed women using a Ricoeurian hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Grounded in nursing’s holistic perspective, her research examines how individuals reinterpret self, meaning, and agency following profound life transitions.

Her positionality is shaped by a commitment to person-centered nursing science and an interest in how social, emotional, and existential dimensions influence health and healing. Drawing from hermeneutic philosophy, she approaches knowledge as co-constructed through interpretation, emphasizing the will, meaning-making, and narrative identity. This standpoint informs her focus on resilience as a dynamic, reconstructive process and guides her aim to generate nursing knowledge that supports compassionate, innovative care for individuals navigating loss and identity transformation.