Shane Claytor was a Navy Corpsman and an Iraq War Veteran. After the military, he dedicated his life to being an ICU nurse, working off and on for the VA for 8 years, including during COVID-19. While working for the VA, he was "disciplined" for speaking out when the COVID-19 pandemic began. He has worked as a travel nurse at 6 different hospitals, interfacing with various hospital operational systems. Shane is passionate about getting the word out to change the VA healthcare system. He is now working as a business consultant and developing an app to help families and loved ones make decisions during the hospitalization process and end-of-life decision making.
Chapter 1: What motivated Shane Claytor to join the military?
And I was never put into a place where I had to actually take the action on the words for somebody like that, but I was glad to know where they stood. And I legitimately wanted people to understand, like, like if I'm in pieces, fucking let me go.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I mean, I told my mom that before I left my mom and my dad, um, I signed the same thing, DNR. And I told them, I don't even want to be on a respirator. I don't want any of it. And they were all in tears. And my aunt, I think, busted out some joke about not having legs. It wasn't the best timing. And I was like, I don't want any of it.
I mean, I respect a lot of the guys that go through that.
Think about it, too. I mean, yeah, so hard to have that conversation with your family. Yeah. Imagine though you being in that place where you can't communicate and now they're having to try to figure out what the fuck to do. That to me feels like it would be harder. Exactly.
And that's part of why I want to develop an app. I've seen that so much. A lot of it is people don't want to face death and they don't want to face the truth. And you have to, you have to think of that stuff ahead of time. Like what you're doing now is the way to do that with your mom, your dad, or, you know what I mean? Your loved ones.
You have to do that early because by the time you get there, all the, the emotion, I've seen it happen all the time where people say, I don't want them intubated. I don't want them on life support. And then the event happens. And they want it. And now they want it all because they're scared to death to let go. And then, you know, and a lot of times that patient suffers.
You know, sometimes they make it out of there, but the majority of times they don't when it gets to that point. But yeah. Yeah. This guy, though. So what happened was with him, he had we wanted it. He kept saying he wanted to be a DNR to me one day. And they were working on that for a long time. And I came in and said, all right, he needs to be a DNR. Like, we need to make him a DNR.
This guy's asking for that. They had already trached him, which he really didn't want. But he allowed his brother talked him into it, which, you know, I understand that. I respect that. If he made the decision, his brother leaned on him. The doctors sometimes tell him that there's going to be hope. That's their decision. But I came in and started talking to him.
And he said, he was still pretty verbal even through the trach. And he told me, I want to be a DNR. And I was happy for him. I said, all right, let me do the work and get this done. And I go talk to, I had to call a psych doc and then all the other doctors got involved. And I left, I was gone. I think I went to Europe for a week or something for school. And I come back and the dude's not a DNR.
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Chapter 2: How did Shane's military experience influence his nursing career?
that she tried to give me a delay of care for. There was never even an order in it in the system. So when I finally was able to look in the actual system, I'm like, this was never even ordered. So you're accusing me of leaving something on the floor that was never even ordered. You're accusing me, which is, I mean, that's an absolute crime. And absolutely, she's of a protected class.
And so they're allowed to, she can brutalize me. And they got all the reports two weeks after It all happened. So I should have come back two weeks later. Instead, it was seven months because I think they were hoping I would quit or they would hope that I wouldn't fight. I think they were just hoping I'd eventually quit.
Or a lot of times in those systems, what people do under investigation like that is they snap. and then they snap and do something way out of line and then they have to, you know.
Like blowing up at work or something.
Exactly, yeah. And that's kind of what I think happens and what they're hoping for. But that stuff goes on in the VA all the time. I mean, you get these protected class of people that know that they're protected and they brutalize everyone else and they get away with murder and it gets rough.
I mean, I worked a day when I first went to Miami, I had a day I was in an open heart unit and I had come from an open heart unit in Idaho And, you know, open heart unit is more of a, those are big surgeries. But I wasn't an open heart nurse. I'm really not supposed to get an open heart patient. I would get them maybe two, three, four days after.
Well, some of the nurses there were bitter because they found out how much I was making. I was used to that. You get used to dealing with that kind of stuff. And the way I dealt with it, you just work hard. Come in and work hard, bust your ass, and you don't have to worry about that. And eventually, even if they're not making that kind of money, I just look at it as just make yourself needed.
And they're not going to care about that. And a lot of them, when you're lazy by nature... You're, you're not willing to do that. And you know what I mean? I'm willing to do that. So I'm going to make the money and you stop complaining about it. That's how I approached a lot of that. But I had a day in an open heart unit. This guy, he was kind of a protected guy too. Checked a lot of boxes.
I come in and he gives me this patient and I'm like, I'm not supposed to take an open heart patient. It's like a one day heart. And it was an absolute dumpster fire. The guy was I mean, not only am I not trained as an open heart nurse, which is a set training. Um, the guy was, it was a dumpster fire. The guy was super sick. The doctors were arguing over what to do, you know, with the patient.
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