A nurse survived a violent assault at work, and the hardest part came after: nobody would listen. June Garen spent her career in psychiatric nursing and the operating room until a head injury took it away. She is joined by Carleigh Beriont, a local government official and former union organizer, on why violence against health care workers stays quiet, what it costs the people who stay, and what would actually stop it.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:25 Why a fully retired nurse started speaking up again
2:05 The video that stopped her mid scroll
2:56 Nobody is listening to the boots on the ground
3:35 Why assaulted workers do not even become a statistic
4:19 The blame and the gaslighting that follow an assault
6:07 The union win that made administrators listen
6:39 When 24 hour nursing coverage becomes one eight hour shift
7:09 Why nurses put scrubs on the statehouse steps
8:50 What she wrote under her children's photo
10:20 I do not think I was as good of a nurse after that
11:10 Sit with the story before you write the policy
12:26 The bipartisan bill that would force employers to act
13:39 A 3 percent raise against a 15 percent health care hike
14:41 Take home messages

About this episode:
June Garen retired in 2025 after a career split between psychiatric nursing and the operating room, and she left on disability after a head injury she could not risk repeating. She put it all away, until a video of a nurse being killed crossed her feed and, as she describes it, hit her like a sucker punch to the soul. What she found hardest after her own assault was not the injury but the search for anyone who would listen, and she describes the pattern she later heard from other nurses she interviewed for her book: the worker gets pushed to the edge of the herd, her competence gets questioned, and she never even makes it into a statistic, because many employers do not track the numbers at all. She is honest about the cost, saying she came back guarded, flatter, an arm's length from patients, and not as good a nurse as she had been. Carleigh Beriont, a local government official and former union organizer running for Congress in New Hampshire, treats the same story as a policy failure: nurses who unionize can force administrators to act, private equity ownership and bankruptcy have arrived alongside a repeal of round the clock nursing requirements in her state, and a bipartisan bill would put the Department of Labor behind workplace violence prevention if the money can be found. They talk about what hospital administrators should do before the next incident, why cost keeps being the objection, and where Beriont thinks the money should come from. Garen's closing hope is that a few more retired clinicians, the ones with nothing left to lose, wake up and start making noise.

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