Conversations with Paige Slayton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paige Slayton

Hi Paige, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Hi, my name is Paige, I’m 26 years old, and i am a registered nurse and content creator based out of Nashville, TN! I am originally from Connecticut where i grew up for 23 years before moving to Nashville in 2022!

When I graduated high school, I initially had no idea what I wanted to do with my life; all I knew was that I wanted to work somewhere in the healthcare field. I ended up going to Keene State College with an undecided major and stayed there for three semesters before my best friend called me up and asked if I wanted to go to nursing school with her. I had been having roommate issues at the time, still hadn’t declared a major, and was in a long distance relationship with a boy from back home so I decided “what the hell?” and applied to nursing school the next day.

My best friend and I ended up going to nursing school at the University of Saint Joseph together. I graduated in May, took and passed my NCLEX on the first try in July, and started my first nursing job in September at Yale New Haven Hospital. I started dating a new guy around the same time and after about a year, he asked me to move to Nashville with him. I knew I didn’t want to stay in CT but had never moved away from home before outside of living in a dorm for 3 semesters. I was terrified to leave my family, best friend, dream job, and everything I ever knew behind but at the same time, was so excited and ready to start a new adventure. I started applying for jobs and looking for an apartment and 2 months later, we became Nashville residents.

We had originally only planned on staying in Nashville for a year with the intention of moving to Charlotte to be close to my boyfriends brother and his family but I ended up finding my dream nursing job in Nashville and quickly realized I wasn’t going to want to leave any time soon.

One day at work, my unit received a patient from the PACU. Our shift change starts at 645 and the PACU nurse called us at 647 to give report. We told her we were in the middle of shift change and asked for a callback number so the oncoming nurse could call back when she was available. The same PACU nurse called back 2 minutes later, rudely demanding to speak to our charge nurse whom she ended up giving the wrong report on the wrong patient to. When the patient showed up, we realized what had happened and reported it immediately. After my shift, I pulled out my phone and decided to make a tiktok poking fun at how annoying and wildly unsafe it was to transfer stable patients at shift. The next morning, I woke up to 5 million views and thousands of new followers.

That one small event sparked something in me. I started to realize how good I had it on the unit I was working on and that it was much for common for nurses to hate their jobs rather than enjoy them like I did. I realized how the majority of healthcare workers were burnt out and just trying to get through the day. I realized how many bullies there were in the healthcare field. And most importantly, I realized that I wanted to change nursing and nursing culture for future nurses and I now had a way to do it.

I started making a couple nursing Tiktoks per week on my breaks at work and noticed that the majority of the videos I posted got a lot of views and, subsequently, followers. Within the week, I had hit 10,000 followers and was invited into Tiktok’s creator fund where I had the opportunity to make money from my videos. At first I was making maybe a couple extra hundred dollar a month which would usually pay for our groceries. I was ecstatic and thought I was the coolest person ever for making money on social media. Over the next few months, my following started growing…50K…100K…200K. I started getting messages from nursing students saying I was the reason they decided to become a nurse, that my videos gave them the courage to stand up for themselves, that I gave them hope that nurses that love their jobs and non-toxic nursing jobs existed. I couldn’t believe how much impact I had had in such a small amount of time. One day, I got a message from a mom – she told me how her son had gone unresponsive after she had seen a video of mine where I was doing CPR. She said that seeing that video helped her to know what to do to save her sons life, which she did. I started bawling my eyes out when I read that message. One of my videos helped save a LIFE. In that moment, I fell in love with what I was doing on social media. I fell in love with educating, empowering, and advocating for new nurses all while being blessed with the privilege of getting to turn it into my job.

Its been 2 years since I started making “silly little videos” and I now have over 1 million followers across platforms, still get to work my dream nursing job part time, live in one of the coolest cities in the country, and the guy that asked me to move to Nashville with him asked me to marry him. If you had asked me three years ago where I thought I would be in life today, not one thing I would have said would have even come close to the dream Im living now.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think it’s safe to say that both nursing and a content creation come with their own types of obstacles and challenges.

As far as nursing goes, I started my nursing school prerequisites in January of 2018 and i started my nursing clinical in January of 2019 right before covid hit. All of our classes transitioned to online, nursing students were no longer allowed at clinical sites, and we were forced to attend virtual clinical. I remember thinking my nursing career was over before it even started because how was I supposed to learn and gain nursing experience taking care of virtual patients that follow an algorithm? I remember thinking that theres no way any type of AI generated nursing scenario could prepare me for a real world code. I was terrified that when and IF I ever became a nurse, that I would be unprepared and would have no idea what I’m doing. Fortunately, we ended up only doing virtual clinical for about a year before transitioning back into the hospitals, so I was still able to get 4 semesters of clinical in the hospitals, making me feel a lot more confident about becoming an actual nurse.

Once I started my nursing career, it was really rough. I started working on a surgical stepdown/medical surgical unit, and as a new grad, I would sometimes get up to 7 patients at a time because some of the older nurses on the unit would get overwhelmed and would refuse additional patients or make a fuss about getting admits. I “took one for the team” and ended up getting sucked into taking one for the team almost every shift because I was too afraid to speak up for myself and wanted the other nurses to like me. I cried on the way home from the majority of my shifts and I remember thinking that I chose the wrong career and didnt even want to be a nurse anymore. But I stayed hopeful that things would get better when the pandemic ended. On top of that, since so many nurses quit during the covid pandemic, Yale was offering insane incentive pay to pick up extra shifts. At one point, they were offering $60 extra PER HOUR to pick up shifts. Since I work roughly 40 hours in only 3 days as a nurse, I started picking up 3 extra days per week, which all ended up being OT so I was getting time and a half as well, amounting to over $140/hour. I came out of school with $120,000 in student debt because I wasted 3 semesters at Keene State, so i was broke as a joke and needed all the money I could get so I could eventually move out of my parents house. I was working well over 72 hours per week and was burnt out to the max…but at least I was making money, and a lot of it.

Content creation, however, is a whole different ball game. People always ask me questions about how I got into social media and if I have any advice for starting, and the first thing I always tell people is that you have to have a strong backbone, be able to take a joke, and not care about other peoples opinions. When I first started social media, the amount of hate I got was astronomical. I’ve never really cared about what people thought of me, especially not strangers on the internet, but it can really start to weigh on you after a while. And the bigger you grow, the more hate you get, so you can imagine what my comments and dm’s look like now; people private messaging me horribly nasty things and telling me how much they hate me, people sending threats, people telling me i shouldn’t be a nurse because they don’t understand the dark humor of healthcare workers, etc. Its something new almost every day and I constantly have to remind myself that these people are just miserable in their own lives and don’t matter to me regardless.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a registered nurse and I work in Emergency Department stepdown/overflow! I can honestly say that I love my job and truly look forward to getting to do it each time I work. I was able to drop down to part time, which is two days a week, at the beginning of 2024 because of my social media, and now I don’t even have to work at all if i don’t want to but I could never even imagine leaving the nursing field for so many different reasons. I get to make a difference in peoples lives when they are at their most vulnerable, I get to see new medicine and research every week, I get to see so many different new procedures and treatments, I get to work with some of the most amazing people I have ever met, and I get to do it all in pink scrubs!!

I got really lucky with the unit I ended up on. My coworkers and I call it the “unicorn unit” for a few different reasons; first, on paper, we are the #1 unit in the entire hospital (which is 1700+ beds) in patient satisfaction scores, compliance, and employee retention. Secondly, since our management runs three different units, they dont sit on our floor. While we have the most amazing management that a nurse could ever ask for, you wouldn’t believe what this does for culture and morale. Theres no micromanagement, nobody breathing down your neck while you work, and employees tend to feel more comfortable and happy at work. Third, we only have 13 beds on our unit so theres typically only 3 nurses, a charge nurse, and a CNA working during a shift. We all sit at one nurses station and can see all of the rooms from it, and because of this, we tend to work more as a team than as individual nurses, which I have never seen on any of the other units in the hospital, or anywhere else I have ever worked. Of course we each have our assigned patients, but we are all constantly jumping in and helping each other throughout the shift and always make sure nobody gets left behind. And lastly, the best thing about the unit I work on is that nobody is from Nashville so when we all moved here, we all became each others main friend group. We go out to bars and brunch together after work, Nashville Sounds, SC, and Titans games together on the weekends, have wine nights at each others houses, go on vacations together, etc. So going to work is like going to hang out with friends every day and I couldn’t be more grateful that I get to work in such a positive, upbeat, welcoming environment with all of my favorite people, getting to do my favorite thing.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I have been a risk-taker my entire life, although my parents would probably call my risk taking “being a nightmare child”, but they would be correct. Breaking rules and doing things I wasn’t supposed to be doing was my favorite thing to do. My mom even looked into sending me to military school when I was 5 because she didn’t know what else to do. I was an absolutely impossible child. I got kicked out of daycare because I was “too much to handle”, I got kicked out of girl scout camp because I didn’t listen to my troop leader and went off on my own, I got kicked out fo summer camp because I pulled the fire alarm, and I got kicked out of my Keene State College orientation because the people I was hanging out with got caught with booze in their room. Im not sure if I would call all of that risk taking or just being disobedient and bad, but I certainly had an interesting childhood.

The biggest risk I have ever taken was packing up my entire life on a whim to move almost halfway across the country with a man that I dated for a year, broke up with, and go back together with 2 months before actually moving….and it ended up being the best thing that has ever happened to me. I went from living in a farm town in Connecticut driving an hour to and from a job I wasn’t sure I even liked, to living in my dream city, doing my dream job, marrying the love of my life, and building a social media platform full of incredible supporters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paigeslayton.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paigeslayton_/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080665834737
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@paigeslayton_?_t=8r9hm7bwjM3&_r=1