171 - Kendall Martin Pt 1: Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

Join nurse and Eureka, Nevada native Honored Guest Kendall Martin as he chats about growing up in a small hometown, who inspires him most in life, the importance of bing comfortable with being uncomfortable, his recent “work project” trip to Mexico, his journey to nursing via EMS, his desire to pursue a CRNA, his incredible advice for studying in nursing school, and more!

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Feeding Our Young® podcast. I got someone in studio. I'm go to him. That's it. ah No, just kidding. Of course I'm never, rarely. Am I a man of little words? uh Much to other people's chagrin. That being said, uh I have had a day. It's been quite the day and the day's not done yet. I had the honor of teaching uh one of my cohorts last weeks uh in OB. And so I've just, that's always an emotional experience for me because I'm so freaking passionate about teaching my students. And especially when they're just so incredible as the ones I get to teach. I just like the clinical conference. do like a little pizza party and we were like, there were tears shed and all the things like I miss them. genuinely will miss them. I look forward to the next group coming in, but without further ado, then I'm going to just a quick shout out to them because I've never done that before. So apologies to my previous cohorts. for whom I might have recorded an episode nearabouts, but because I literally am recording this episode on the day that they were done, just a huge shout out to Ainsley, Annabel, Grace, Kayliana, Molly, oh, and Molly, and Naomi, and Sarah, and Vanessa. uh Nine incredible human beings who are going to make incredible nurses who literally are in the middle of their second semester of junior year. So they still got quite a ways to go. Anyone out there that's the praying type, by all means, I'm sure they'd appreciate it. But this episode. is not about them. No, instead it is absolutely critical that you listen to what my honored guest has to say today. If you didn't hear that, let me repeat it for you. It is critical that you listen to what my honored guest has to say. Yes, because for those of you that are like, I am so tired of hearing from OB nurses. I know there's nobody out there, but I just hear that voice in my head. Today's not one of those days. We're not talking OB other than what I just mentioned. Instead, I've got an incredible human being who I met while floating to the ICU. Yes, the ICU, the three letters that I dread most in my life. This man runs towards them while I run away from them unless I'm being forced to float to them. So let's find out what it is like to actually love doing the things that scare me the most. Welcoming to studio, Mr. Kendall Martin. Kendall, how are you doing today? Good, sir? I'm doing amazing, thank you. Thanks for sitting through my two minute intro. That was ridiculous. Well, let's just start. I've already let the cat out of the bag. You were working. Therefore, you must already be a nurse. So why don't you introduce yourself? Who are you? And what degrees do you hold? And where did you get them? Yeah, so I'm Kendall. currently hold uh BSN in nursing. I went to Great Basin College in northern Nevada, Elko, Nevada, and it's a small college. They have like numerous outlying sites. And the nursing program I went through there had three sites, one in Elko one in Pahrump and one in Winnemucca, Nevada. And then we just like zoomed in together for our classes. It was a relatively small class. My cohort in Elko was like 25 students. And then I graduated with my ADN in 2021 and then immediately rolled into my BSN and finished that in a year and graduated with that in 2022. Congrats, good sir. That's amazing. That's education on top of education. And I mean, I don't want to the cat out of the bag. We don't have to talk too much about it upfront, but rumor has it you might not be done. No, I'm trying to go back to school. I have taken smaller classes online. I just finished up a biochemistry class this last year and I am working on applying to CRNA school. So, yeah, we'll see how that goes. I have a few interviews coming up. Let's go and we'll talk a little bit more about that because I have a hunch that fits under the umbrella of challenges you've faced so far. A little teaser for what's to come. ah where, so then where is home? What do you consider home and what do you love most about your hometown? Let's just lump that in here right now. So I grew up in the middle of Nevada, in Eureka, Nevada, which is just a really small town, kind of in the middle of nowhere, not very many people know where it is. And it's right along Highway 50, and it's called the friendliest town on the loneliest highway. And... It's a really small town of about 600 people and the county has a population of about 1500 people along with it. The town itself doesn't have any stoplights and no fast food restaurants or anything like that. The next nearest town would be Ely, Nevada, which would be about 77 miles from our house, which also has the nearest hospital. uh And so that's where I grew up and I really enjoyed growing up in a small town you know about everybody in town and my parents had a small restaurant and a butcher shop and so working in the restaurant and the butcher shop I got to know pretty much everybody in the community and we were really involved with our community which was which is great and I I really liked it there. Wow, I've like, I just can't, I've never lived in a quote unquote small town. And so just to listen to you, I'm like, I mean, surely, and you don't have to get into any juicy details, but I'm assuming there's a negative side to being in a small town, it's that Kendall Martin kid. uh Well, okay, before we dive more into you, the two other traditional opening questions, what are the three words you chose to describe nursing school? So I thought about this and the three words that I picked are rewarding, resilient, and transformative. And then the worst question in all the world, what are three of your favorite songs in life right now? So I'm a Christian, so a lot of that guides some of the music I listen to. But the one song that I've been listening to a lot is Go Light Your World. by the Heartland Harmony Girls sing it. And kind of the lyrics of the song is, seek out the lonely, tired and worn, take your candle, go light your world. And I just really like that picture. And then the other song isn't a song that I've been listening to a lot lately, but it was a song that I listened to a lot in nursing school. And it is Thrive by Casting Crowns. And I'm just gonna read the lyrics real quick from that. Let's go So it goes, to know you and to make you known, we lift your name on high, shine like the sun, make darkness run and hide. We know we are made for so much more than ordinary lives. It's time for us to more than just survive. We were made to thrive. And that was kind of my... um for nursing school, wanted to do more than just survive and be ordinary. I wanted to thrive. And so that was kind of my uh song for nursing school. And then I'm kind of cheating on the last one, but I had two songs I wanted to put together. They're both by Granger Smith and the one is Bye Boy Baseball and the other one is I Kill Spiders. And I really liked those two songs because Bye Boy Baseball just... brings back childhood memories of playing catch with my dad at home and playing baseball. And then I Kill Spiders, I really like that song in the relationship he paints between a dad and his daughter and it just kind of gives you a vivid picture. So ah those are my songs. Oh, well first of all, we here at Feeding Our Young make our own rules. So yeah, those are great three songs that you chose. We do whatever we want around here. Some people are like, don't listen to music. Here's my podcast that I like listening to and here's the books I like listening to. So who cares? But I love that. And that actually leads, I guess, right into the first getting to know you question. And everybody's gonna go, know where you're going with this, Eric, and I know what his answer's gonna be. No, you don't. There's actually more than one little bit to that answer. But you... responded to the prompt, inspires you? Yeah, so when I think of people that inspire me, I don't necessarily think of just one person. ah I think of people that come to mind that inspire me are people that work to the top of their profession, are performing at a top level in whatever field they're working, whether it's a paramedic, nurse, doctor, those that strive to do more than just uh the bare minimum. And also kind of along with that, have my family. inspires me, my parents. I have an awesome mom and dad that were great examples for me and they inspire me. And then kind of another general uh idea that people inspire or people that inspire me is dads who do an amazing job of being a father and just seeing how they raise their children just really inspires me. And going back to kind of people that inspire me and early on in my EMS career, I got into listening to podcasts and one person in particular, Flightbridge Ed, which Eric Bauer hosts that show and going the whole way back to the beginning of his podcast, he did a podcast on cellular respiration and he just inspired me to want to learn things at a much deeper level and to have an understanding of pathophysiology and why we do what we do. And even as a EMT going to advanced EMT school and even though a lot of it was kind of above what I was learning, I still wanted to learn as much as I could. And I've taken that with me from EMS and into nursing school and where I work today as well. So we're gonna circle back around to that because I'm very excited to, yeah, I just, it's so cool that someone out there that you have no connection with whatsoever inspired you along your career path. And we're gonna talk about that career path. ah But part of that I wanna add to this and the other get to know you question, and it's gonna inform everybody exactly the person we're dealing with here. And that is, what is your superpower? So I don't know if I necessarily call it a superpower. It's something that I've had to learn. ah But I have learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And over time, I started out in EMS and as a new EMT I was super uncomfortable with some of the situations I was put in. was like, I do not know what I'm doing. I just... learned to work my way through it and same with nursing school. I was a first generation college student and I had nobody really to walk me through that and so I remember walking into the college telling them what I wanted to do and just also being uncomfortable with that and it's just kind of as long as if you're staying where you're comfortable you're never going to grow and it's all about putting yourself out there and getting uncomfortable and learning to be okay with that. So you mean to tell me that that feeling of not knowing what you're doing is not exclusive to nurses? No, no So we're going to dive into that a little bit more too, but before we get off the subject of being uncomfortable, which I feel like is going to kind of underscore everything you're about to tell us, ah but being in situations where you're uncomfortable and how that leads to growth. Where you went somewhere recently, where was that and what did you do? Because that to me did not read like a comfortable trip. No, so I went down to Mexico about two weeks ago, three weeks ago. I was down there for 10 days and I went down there as part of a work project and I didn't know what all I was getting into. ah But I ended up spending quite a few days at an old people's home there. And when I say old people's home, it's not what you think of as far as in the States. It was... an old people's home basically where people went to get off the streets uh and had nowhere else to go. And I don't know how to paint a picture, but the easiest way to paint a picture is you had an outdoor courtyard and then you had these little rooms off to the side that housed about as many people as they could hold you would have. beds like stacked beside each other and a small room with about six to eight people in it that would sleep in there. And then they ate and did everything else in the courtyard. And it's in Tijuana, Mexico. So environment wise, uh it's not like it was cold like it is here. But just the smell, you can't explain the smell, but it smelled so bad. And the rooms, they had to have bed bugs. uh We were initially me and a friend of mine were uh patching drywall holes. The drywall there was like very flimsy and they had quite a few holes at the baseboards and stuff where it got kicked in and so we would go around um cutting them out and then put a new drywall in and then girls were coming by coming through and then repainting the rooms and everything but Two days I ended up... This was the part I was not expecting to get stuck with, but I ended up... They found out I was a nurse and then they were like, hey, do you want to help shower some of the old people that can't shower themselves? And so I was like, sure. And honestly, I found it in some ways to be the most rewarding part of the trip. As weird as that sounds. Because you take someone that was... super dirty and clean them up and they felt so much better at the end when you were done. And there have been quite a few that I probably hadn't had, I know hadn't had a shower in like three months. And so that it was a, it was honestly like very, yeah, humbling and rewarding experience. And it, it makes you realize how, much you have and how grateful I am for what I do have. No kidding. I mean, I remember that takes me back to a couple of our Mexico mission trips when I was in youth and all the things. And I didn't grow up in the church or anything like that. But when I was in youth group, man, I was like, let's go. Like I'm all in. And I just, I feel like everyone should be required to do something like that once in their life because you do, like you said, there was no greater feeling than A, being able to help people and B, you know what I mean? Easing people's ways, doing all the things. And then you come back across the border and you see that American flag and you're just like, okay, you know what mean? I'm not trying to get ultra patriotic and I know patriotism means so many different things to so many different people here in 2026. But the point is when you go somewhere else, you don't know the language, you don't know anything else, you see these improversed conditions and you come back home and you're like, oh. Yeah, this is all right. It's okay that my one spot in my bathroom doesn't, you know what mean? This isn't, I just, it so puts things into perspective. So I appreciate you opening the door to that. And it's to me like the perfect encapsulation of you talking about finding comfort in uncomfortable situations. So um let's just keep going with your career progression then, because you've already opened that door to EMT, or starting out in EMS. So why did you start on EMT? Take us along that where does nursing come into play? Why did you go into nursing? But before that came EMS. So why EMS? Why medical? Yeah, so when I was young, growing up, always had a fascination with ambulances. whenever we'd drive by an accident, I would always stare as long as I could at the scene and just wonder what was going on. And every time an ambulance would go by with their license sirens, I just wondered what was going on in the back of that ambulance. so... Like I mentioned, I grew up in a really small town and when I was 19, the... Eureka County had, had its own EMS, um, station. It was separate from the fire department and they were comprised pretty much a hundred percent of volunteers except for the director and they had one paid, uh, advanced EMT, but everything else was, a hundred percent volunteer. They put on an EMT class and so I immediately jumped at. at the opportunity and I had no idea what I was getting into. thought I was taking an uh EMT basic class. I didn't realize that the book was going to be two feet thick. That's an exaggeration, but it's a big book. And the amount of information that I had to learn ah over the course of three, four months was quite a bit. to go from knowing nothing about medical to learning that. was a challenge. And so I started out working for Eureka County EMS and we weren't busy. We probably ran about 120 calls a year. So about two a week is what it came out to. And the difficulty was we were really far from a hospital. So like I had mentioned, uh Ely had our closest hospital, but that hospital was so small we didn't really transport to it. The hospital we transported the most to was in Elko, Nevada, which was 110 miles away. And so I would work all day and then I'd get home at night and I'd have my radio uh at home and sometimes I'd go off at like nine, 10 o'clock at night and then I'd get up and we did fly a lot of patients but if weather was bad ah or they just didn't need to be flown but they still need to go to hospital. So you leave for the call at 10 o'clock at night and you get home, back home at like two in the morning from just one call. So it made for some interesting, interesting times and interesting situations. ah But yeah, and I... Volunteered there for quite a while and I just found I wanted more I Didn't like how few calls that we went on and I felt like I never really got good at being an EMT I did just enough to To be okay, but I wasn't just running a ton of calls. So I started volunteering with Elko County ambulance and I would drive up there and do work a 24-hour shift or a 48-hour shift with them and knew I wanted to go farther so I got my advanced EMT. And then soon after I got my advanced EMT, I was hired on full time by Elko County Ambulance and I did that for a year. And during that time I was unsure of what all I wanted to do. I was thinking I was wanting to go farther and become a paramedic, but... So at the time I actually applied for paramedic school and was accepted and during my time there with Elko County I realized I wanted to get more into critical care. I really enjoyed when we took care of ICU level patients and also we worked really closely with uh the flight companies there because we also flew a lot of patients out. And so I ended up talking to one of the flight nurses and getting his perspective on what nursing was like and his pathway to becoming a flight nurse. And after talking to numerous nurses and numerous paramedics, I decided I wanted to go the nursing route for a couple of reasons. One was I wanted to work specifically in critical care and have the opportunity to work in an ICU. So obviously, you need to be a nurse to do that. And then second is as a paramedic, there are good jobs out there, but there are... usually pretty competitive and they're kind of few and far in between and you can't necessarily move anywhere and have a job, a good job as a paramedic, whereas a nurse you can move basically anywhere and have a relatively good job. So that was another reason that I decided to go nursing. And the other reason too was I decided if I didn't want to do flight or I wanted to do something else, nursing gives me a lot of other avenues to go down uh education-wise. The problem with paramedic is you get your paramedic license, but then after that there's no pathway. Some paramedics go into PA school, some paramedics go into medical school if they want to go farther, or you can get into management, but there wasn't like a clear pathway farther than after you're a paramedic. So those were kind of some of the reasons I decided I wanted to become a nurse. And one of the... I distinctly remember this scenario uh that also inspired me to want to become a nurse. had brought a patient, I forget the exact scenario, but we had brought a patient into the ER and we ended up flying that patient out later with the local flight company. And before they were going to fly that patient, the patient needed to be inubated. And the... I knew the flight nurse really well and the flight medic was one of the paramedics that I worked with on the ground before he went to fly. And the ER doctor just handed the patient over to that flight medic and flight nurse and told them to innovate and if they needed anything to come get her, but she just left it in their hands. And just watching them... oh go through step by step uh clear communication on how they were going to handle this patient. And the flight nurse wanted to innovate because they don't have as much experience innovating prior to flying as medics do. they came up with a game plan. The flight nurse said, I'm going to go in. I'm going to do one attempt. We're going to pre-oxygenate appropriately. And I'm going to make one attempt. If his SATs drop below 92%, I'm going to come back out. We're going to re-bag the patient and get his SATs back up. the paramedic was going to innovate. Then, flight nurse ended up doing a phenomenal job innovating the patient and they were transported the patient to University of Utah. that just seeing that just inspired me to be a flight nurse and that kind of changed since then, but ah it also inspired me that I wanted to get into nursing as well. So yeah. Wow, mean, that not only, mean, it seems it sounds like that moment like crystallized for you, like this desire to seek more, whatever that looked like, you in the time you said it looked like flight nursing, right? But instead you're like that since changed, but you're looking at that and going, I can do this, I can do this, I can do, you know what I mean? I can go farther than I've been where I'm at and all of that. And that is so inspiring to me because again, I'm the kind of guy that's like. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. I don't even know. Like, let me ask you this, Candle. This is an offshoot question. I wouldn't, based on our limited time together, classify you as an adrenaline junkie, would you? Not not particularly but um yeah, I am a little bit though for sure Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, so for me I knew like I was like no, this is not my jam. I will save a life. I have no problem saving a life. I love I'll do it. I just would rather be the exception and not the rule. And so and that's what impressed me most when I came down like just seeing you work with your patients and your calm, cool, collected demeanor. And I'm like I this is not that I couldn't I could not do this. And m I don't want to turn this all on me. I'll never forget my mom telling me one time growing up, you're talking about mom and dad, right? My mom told me once, she's like, Eric, you can do anything you set your mind to. She's such a supportive mom. You can do anything that you set your mind to. And I really loved that and appreciated it. And then as I became an adult, I realized while that might be true, there are some of those things that would take me an inordinate amount of lifetimes to figure out how to do. So therefore they are no longer on the list. And so I just love, Kendall, that you are like, you see this happen and you go, this is my jam. This is where I'm at. This is, I'm home. I can do things. I'm going to go stretch myself in that regards. And so. You thought at the time, flight nursing, if you don't mind my asking, what changed along the way that stopped that from being the dream you were chasing? So in nursing school, I had my OR rotation and all of our clinicals were done at NNRH there in Elko. And so it's obviously a small hospital, but during my OR rotation, I ended up making friends with a CRNA there and he... let me hang out with him the whole case. ended up sitting there with him and watching him innovate and then medicate the patient and ah manage the patient hemodynamically throughout the whole case. And that particular case, was a robotic... ah uh shoulder, forget exactly what they were doing. But anyway, just watching him and his understanding of pathophysiology and pharmacology and being able to anticipate Drop in the patient's blood pressure and immediately fixing that just really fascinated me and we talked through a lot of the medications while I was with him and Afterwards, he encouraged me to think about CRNA school after after I graduated at the time I was also more focused on just passing nursing school I was just like one step at a time, but it just really fascinated me and The thing that really fascinated me about anesthesia was the amount of medications that you can push and you see an immediate reaction. You do one thing, you get an immediate reaction and ah then you counter that with another medication. And that just, in the hands-on... uh clinical aspect of it just really fascinated me. And so after nursing school, I knew at the time I knew I wanted to get into a big ICU. ah So whether I wanted to fly or go to CRNA school. so that's what took me to Spokane was I didn't want to I looked at several places to move. I didn't want to move to the West Coast because there was just too many people for me. And Spokane had a good mix of rural, you have the city, but then you can get out into small towns and get out in the country. So that's what brought me to Spokane. And then after working in the ICU and seeing more about that and also I was just at a point in my life where I realized I can go back to school if I want. I have nothing really holding me down and so that also is what kind of led me to yeah wanting to pursue CRNA school. Very cool, very cool. Well, if it's alright with you, I have one more question for you in this what looks to be first part of a two-part uh episode uh journey with you, Kendall, because you have, I'm seeing what you have to say, and I think we've got at least a good another, oh, I don't know, episodes worth writing us here, right here. uh And so, the last question I wanna ask before we jump over to the part B side of the Kendall Martin experience, and that is this. Most people know that when, long time listeners of the podcast, long time, I don't know, we've been around less than two years, but people who've listened to more than one episode know that, you know what mean, I like to go down that journey and then we kind of spend a little time talking about nursing school. So my apologies to nursing students and prospective nursing students, but I only have one nursing school related question for him. And it's one thing that I really found fascinating that you want to address because in the second part of your episode situation, we're going to talk about more of his career progression. and some other incredibly exciting things that you don't want to miss. So with that, you wanted to talk about study habits in nursing school. So if someone's listening going, my gosh, this guy's smart, he's doing his thing, he's in critical care, what do you have to say about study habits in nursing school? So I So before nursing school, I I hated high school. I I should be Straightforward. I actually never graduated high school. I got my GED and I ended up Wanting to work more than I wanted to go to school. I do not recommend that but anyway, that's the way it was I so when I went to I to nursing school. I had to start back a little bit farther in my math and my English. And I quickly realized, I kinda nerded out I guess on what makes uh people who they are. How do you get top level students? And it's not... about being the smartest person in the room or about having the highest IQ. It also comes down to a lot about how dedicated you are and the type of study habits you have. And I'll just put out a little plug. There's a YouTube channel called uh Med School Insiders, which is geared towards med school students for a lot of things, but he goes a lot into study habits and studying uh and how to do well. in school and so I applied a lot of what he taught for med students and applied that to nursing school. And two of the things that I found worked the best for me, uh one was uh spaced repetition and the other one was the pomodoro technique. And spaced repetition is just going over something and then if you don't understand it very well, coming back to it later that day or the next day. And the way I did that was there's an app called Anki and you can look it up and it's kind of complicated to use. You can get as deep as you want with it. But the way the app works is it's kind of like flashcards and you... ah Answer the question and then if it's easy, you'll say yes, it's easy and then I'll bring up the same question three days later If it was hard, it'll bring it up that afternoon again for you and you just go through go through the app and you may you have to make all your own flashcards but that was one thing that helped things really stick for me and then the other one the pomodoro technique is just a fancy word for kind of talking about time and studying. What it is is if you sit down and you're like, I'm just going to study all afternoon, that generally doesn't work. You get sidetracked. You do, yeah, it just doesn't work out very well. So what the Pomodoro technique emphasizes is setting a timer and being like, okay, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to study for 30 minutes or I'm going to study for 45 minutes, generally less than an hour, but whatever timeframe you feel you need. And you just focus a hundred percent on that. And then after that your timer goes off and You get about you can give yourself like a 15 minute break often the way I practice that was I'd be in the library and I would Sit down focus on studying for 30 to 45 minutes and then get up and kind of walk around the library For about 15 minutes and then go back and focus and I found I got a lot more accomplished ah That way and then kind of another thing that goes into studying There is a lot of memorizing that you have to do in nursing school, but one thing that I found helpful for me was always trying to see if I could understand a why behind it. if you, it all comes kind of back to pathophysiology, but if you can understand the why in pathophysiology. And then if you come to a question that you're stumped on, if you understand the why, you can usually work your way through that question and then you're able to answer that or have at least an educated guess. so it's not... And there honestly isn't a way around memorizing too. There's some things that you just have to memorize. But if you can understand the why behind it, that'll help a lot more as well. And I feel like that is, appreciate all three of those tips. And sorry, very briefly, can you spell the name of that app that you referred to in your first pointer? Anki, it's spelled A-N-K-I. I appreciate all three of those tips and that is absolutely fantastic because um anything that we can do to get ahead and like you said, know, going to dial in back to one of the songs you picked, you wanted to not just survive in nursing school, you wanted to thrive and you strike me as that type of individual. I'm that type of individual and I've known a lot of people who are that types of individual. I feel like though sometimes, you do have to just like there are some days or some tests or some subjects that you do have to survive so that you can later thrive, right? And so I think that those like anytime we can get those practical tips, here's how you do this, here's how you can study, here's this, maybe that gets you through the worst part of nursing school. So I'm gonna, with your permission, Mr. Kendall, this was not pre-discussed. I usually warn my honored guests and I didn't even think about it. But every once in a while we go just long enough that I know that we're gonna be tipping over an hour total. ah It's not more time for you, but the point is it gives us two full episodes for people to listen to. Are you alright if we just jump into part two now? yeah, no, I'm good with that. I love it. Alright guys, you don't want to miss it. Catch part two of the Kendall Martin Experience coming up next.