Dr. JB Kirby is doctorate-prepared Nurse Practitioner who has over 37 years of experience in healthcare. She is the Chief Executive Officer of the website, www.drjbkirby.com. The website was created to provide health information in an easy-to-understand format.
Dr. Kirby began her career in healthcare as a volunteer firefighter for a small town in Ohio, USA. She soon learned that the fire department also needed Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT).
An EMT is a person who has specific training to provide basic emergency medical treatment. This includes splinting injuries for a patient following a motor vehicle collision, administering lifesaving epinephrine for a patient suffering an allergic reaction, or even administering CPR to a patient in cardiac arrest.
EMTs can also administer oxygen, deliver a newborn baby and deliver certain medication.
She was 18-years-old and thought this sounded like fun. As an EMT she would carry a walkie-talkie like radio that would dispatch her and her colleagues to people’s homes when they had a medical emergency.
Typical calls in her community included falls that would result in broken bones, people having problems breathing due to respiratory conditions such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
When she was 19 years-old, she became a paramedic. This additional education allowed her to perform more in the field medical treatments such as paramedics can perform more complex procedures such as inserting intravenous (IV) lines, administering drugs, and applying pacemakers.
Part of her paramedic training required her to shadow the registered nurses (RNs) in a busy Emergency Room. This was Dr. Kirby’s first in-hospital experience. She was awe-struck.
A hospital functioned as a little city. Hospitals have their own cafeterias, mail delivery systems, and a place to get clothing (albeit the clothing were scrubs). You could live in a hospital and never lack basic necessities.
Dr. Kirby spent numerous hours watching the RNs and immediately knew this was something she could do. She finished her paramedic training and then started looking for ways that she could go to school to become a RN.
Life was going pretty well for Dr. Kirby. She was working full-time as a manager in a fast food restaurant and volunteering part-time as a paramedic.
Then, as life would have it – she found herself unexpectedly pregnant and single. The night she went into labor, her boyfriend of 2 years left her. Her sister came to the hospital to provide emotional support when she had a beautiful baby boy.
Dr. Kirby soon realized that working the long, crazy hours in fast food restaurant were not good for a single mother. She knew that nurses made good money and a pretty good working schedule. Yes, the hours were long, but they weren’t working until midnight one day only to return at 6:00 a.m. the next like she did at her restaurant job.
JB packed up her son and her meager belongings and moved in with her parents who were living in a small town in Virginia. The town had a community college that offered a program to become a registered nurse. She enrolled in classes immediately.
Turns out that being a single parent in the U.S. was a good thing. The government was going to help her go to school by paying for daycare and gas money to get to class! JB Kirby was able to start her nursing education as a single parent and with her toddler in tow.
Even though some expenses were paid by the government, not all living expenses were covered, so she found herself working at a factory making automobile parts. She worked 4 days a week from 5:00 pm to 5:00 am. Her parents were able to help by watching her son while she worked.
Having family close by was wonderful. But her parents were semi-retired and having a toddler in the house was not what they had planned. So JB bought a house just down the road from her parents. This allowed her and her parents some privacy.
However, as nursing school clinicals began, JB found that working and trying to do clinicals and study became too much. She talked to her parents who agreed to pay her mortgage but JB would have to provide everything else.
JB was able to qualify for food stamps and her son was provided free health insurance through Medicaid. She also received additional grocery assistance through a program called, “Women, Infant, and Children”, or WIC for short. WIC provided cereal, milk, butter, and cheese for JB and her son.
JB soon graduated with an associates degree in science and passed her exam to become a registered nurse. Tired of small town life, she moved to Roanoke, Virginia where she began her nursing career.
Because of her experience as a paramedic and her love of any adrenalin-producing situation, she started working in the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU).
Dr. JB Kirby thrived in the ICU. Every patient was critically ill and presented their own unique challenges and health issues. She worked 12-hour shifts three days a week. This gave her ample time to spend with her son and to get to know her new town of Roanoke.
Although Roanoke, VA is a beautiful town and a great place to raise a child, Dr. Kirby was missing her home state of Ohio, her friends, and the familiarity of where she grew up.
In 1993, JB packed up her belongings and her 5 year-old and she moved back to Ohio. She started working at one of the local hospitals in their ICU. She loved being home and being able to spend time with her friends.
She thrived as a registered nurse. Taking care of people and educating patients about their health became a passion. She vowed to help patients make informed decisions about their health issues and the available treatment options.
She encouraged patients to think about their quality of life, not just the quantity. Patients loved her for this. She received numerous letters and acknowledgements from patients, their families, and her employer about the important work she was doing and how her patients were benefiting from this.
As time went on, Dr. Kirby realized that an associate’s degree wouldn’t be enough to progress up the career ladder so she enrolled at the University of Phoenix to obtain her bachelor’s degree.
This was in the 1990’s when online education was unheard of and the University of Phoenix was one of the first university’s to embrace online education. This type of education was perfect for someone who was a working single parent.
In July 2001, she completed her bachelor of science in nursing degree and she found that she really enjoyed learning everything she could about nursing. Odd for someone who skipped more of her high school courses than she attended and for someone who graduated high school early – at the end of the 11th grade.
Dr. Kirby continued her education and obtained her master’s degree from Wright State University in November 2004. She became a board-certified nurse practitioner (NP) in 2005.
As an NP, Dr. Kirby could manage patients’ health conditions by treating injuries and illnesses, as well as supporting injury and disease prevention.
Dr. Kirby’s love of responding to patients in acute disaster situations never died; it was just placed on the back burner while she raised her son and continued her education.
In 2002, she volunteered for the Ohio Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT). In this capacity, she would be deployed to natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and she would also be available to respond to political events if there was a terrorist action.
The Haiti earthquake in 2010 changed Dr. Kirby’s life in a big way. She contracted Typhoid fever which made her immune system hyper-reactive. This led to her contracting a disease known as adhesive arachnoiditis (AA).
AA is chronic pain condition where the meninges in the spine “stick” together. Standing, sitting, and walking became painful conditions. There were times when she couldn’t dress herself because of the pain. Being in chronic pain led to chronic depression.
To confront her depression, Dr. JB Kirby decided to write about it. Her book, Pain Management Decoded: Surviving and Thriving with Chronic Pain, became an Amazon best seller.
She started hearing from people all over the world who were in chronic pain and how they felt so alone. That’s when Dr. JB Kirby decided to create her first website. This website discussed issues that people faced with chronic pain and how to manage this.
This website led to her current website, DrJBKirby.com. This website is dedicated to making health and wellness information easy to understand.
As a NP who’s been in healthcare for over 35 years, Dr. Kirby knows that healthcare can be confusing for patients. Her passion and dedication to educating her patients about their diagnoses and treatment options is what drives her to continuing this project.
The challenges of DrJBKirby.com are many – but they can all be dealt with. The biggest challenge is finding time to dedicate to this business. Dr. Kirby continues to work fulltime helping patients with addiction issues and works on DrJBKirby.com after work or in the early morning hours.
Another challenge is how to grow the website so it’s reaching as many people as possible. Since this is a one woman operation, there isn’t enough funding to buy advertising which would drive people to the website. Dr. Kirby relies on organic traffic, guest posting, and backlinks.
The final challenge is monetizing the website. The plan is to do this through affiliate marketing, but this may change as time goes on.
The opportunities for DrJBKirby.com are numerous. For example, the website can continue to grow and become the go-to website for simple, easy to understand health information and Dr. JB Kirby would also like to talk to patients about their health questions and concerns.
If you want to start a business that focuses on health and wellness, it’s important to treat it as a business – not a hobby. That means scheduling time work on the business even if you don’t feel like it, paying for the tools you need to get the business going, and investing in yourself so you can learn how to run the business.
