Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeny Conrad-Rendon.
Hi Jeny, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
When I was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. While I was trimming my pet hamster’s long hair, it moved. I accidentally cut its skin. My mom and I took it to the veterinarian who said, “it would be cheaper to get another hamster.” My mom ended up paying for it to get stitches. That moment stuck in my head. I assumed that was what all veterinarians would be like. So, I decided that I could never be like that so I gave up on my dream of becoming a veterinarian.
My next dream was to become a teacher. I started college at Laverne University in California. I got married after my freshman year to a Marine. We then moved to North Carolina where I started at Carteret Community College in Morehead City, NC. Unfortunately, only one class from Laverne University transferred to this community college. My college advisor informed me that the field of teaching was saturated, and some teachers were not able to find jobs. After we had our first son, I decided that I did not think that I could be around kids all day as a teacher and then have enough energy for my own children when I came home.
Deep down, I had always wanted to become a nurse like my favorite cousin, Cathy. However, I believed the lies in my own head that I was not smart enough. I believe that these lies stemmed from being the only biological child with four siblings who were adopted and who I felt never truly accepted me. I decided to give it a try anyway. I graduated with my Associate of Arts degree in 1997. My goal was to obtain a degree that would transfer in case my husband got transferred. I did not want to lose more of my college credits.
I applied to the nursing program at East Carolina University and was denied. However, someone did not take their spot. So, then I was accepted into their program. It was a 90-minute drive one way to campus. I met two classmates in a local CPR class who lived about 30 minutes away, so we set up a carpool. One of those classmates became my best friend and we now live about 90 minutes away from one another. We drove back and forth 5 days a week for 2.5 years. We made many memories during that drive and in our clinicals. The program was so hard, but we pulled each other through. I graduated in December 1999 with my Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I even proved to myself that I was smarter than those lies in my head and earned Cum Laude Honors.
I was an RN for ten years before I went back for my Master of Science in Nursing. I worked in about every area of nursing during those 10 years. From birth (labor & delivery), cardiology, behavioral health, primary care, and to death (hematology/oncology). During those ten years I was blessed with three more sons. However, I felt that something was missing from my career. I wanted to truly have more of a say on how patients were treated and be a change that I saw healthcare needed. I applied to the University of TN Health Science Center and was accepted. I felt that the program was harder due to it being on-line, so you were almost teaching yourself. I had one instructor that seemed to go out of her way to make it harder on me personally. My documentation was like my classmates’ but mine was always full of red marks. She even pulled me out of a clinical site and made me start with another but refused to tell me the reasoning. I asked for a meeting with the Dean and this professor. After that she seemed to back off thankfully. I graduated with my Master of Science in Nursing in December 2009…exactly 10 years after I had graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I then passed my certification exam and became a certified Family Nurse Practitioner in 2010.
One of my preceptors in my Family Nurse Practitioner training owned their own clinic which was my next dream. There are twenty-seven states that allow Nurse Practitioners to own their own clinics which is called full practice authority. However, the state of TN is not one of the twenty-seven states and is in fact one of the most restricted states. A nurse practitioner must have a collaborating physician. If you own your own clinic, then most collaborating physicians expect payment which can be as high as several thousand dollars every month. A collaborating physician is supposed to sign 20% of all your charts, 100% of any charts if you prescribed a controlled substance, and come to your clinic once a month. So, another preceptor told me about a possible collaborating physician. This collaborating physician owned her own primary care clinic geared to helping the Hispanic population. Upon graduation, I worked at her clinic with a goal to bring in the English-Speaking Population. After about 6 months, I had approximately fifty patients and decided to open my own clinic and call it Absolute Family Health. Over 5.5 years, I grew it to approximately 1800 patients. My path crossed with that professor who was hard on me in my Master’s Degree program at a conference. Once she found out that I had my own clinic, she asked if I would precept nurse practitioner students. Which I found to be ironic. My clinic was insurance based which comes with a higher level of stress. For example, you have 90 days to bill the health insurance. But they can come back years later and decide that they overpaid you and will not pay you until they recoup their money. I did not pay myself for the first 4 years due to the overhead and paying off the start up costs.
Also, during this time I went through a horrible divorce from my ex who I believe has narcissistic personality disorder which comes from unhealed childhood trauma. He kept me in court for 5 years after our divorce was finalized. My legal costs were insane. I was given a diagnosis of PTSD that led me to go thru EMDR treatment. A judge credited me with what they felt I could be making based on my degree instead of what I was making. So, I lost $900 a month of child support with two days’ notice. My last penny in my bank account went to my lawyer. I had a lease on my clinic space for 5 years. So, I could not just walk away but I also had four sons to take care of. When my lease was over, I relocated my clinic with another nurse practitioner-owned clinic to try to reduce the overhead costs. Their office manager treated my two employees horrible and constantly changed what we had agreed upon. So, after 5.5 years, I decided to merge my clinic with a hospital group and was able to bring my medical assistant with me. Looking back, this was a huge mistake. It was not a merger, but it was them taking my patients and forcing me out. I refused to prescribe narcotics to patients that my collaborating physician at the time was prescribing. These patients were driving hours from other states and paying cash. I have a sibling who battled addiction so know first-hand what addiction can do to people. So, I instead wanted to refer these patients to pain clinics to get their pain controlled and get off narcotics if possible. I was told by the upper management that I had to follow this physician’s plan of care by using my license to prescribe narcotics or find another job. It was the hardest thing to leave my 1800 patients as I genuinely cared about each of them. But I could not do things that I did not feel were in the best interest of patients. So, they let me go.
I then joined a company that was starting a part of their business where a Family Nurse Practitioner and EMT would drive a van that was set up like a small clinic to businesses to provide physicals. I helped grow it within 3 years from hardly any appointments to two vans going out 30 days a month. However, one day, I came across that the other Family Nurse Practitioner forgot her ultrasound machine but still charted that she had provided thyroid and carotid ultrasounds which were billed to insurance companies. So, I did what I thought was right and I brought it up to management. I was paid a severance and told that I was no longer employed.
I then went back to work for my first collaborating physician at her primary care clinic. During this time, I got remarried and we adopted our daughter who had special needs and had endured 8 years of trauma. This job was not able to pay for benefits and health insurance which was so expensive. Covid hit about this same time, and we all know how much of a whirlwind that was. I was on the TN Nurse Association Board and a national nurse association contacted us and asked us to vote to make the Covid vaccines mandatory for all who lived in TN. I had already got the first Covid variant and made it through and also helped hundreds of patients through it as well. I looked at the research of the MRNA technology that was done on ferrets where they all died. I knew that it would take years to truly know the long-term effects. I told my fellow board members that I would not vote to make an experimental shot mandatory. Shortly afterwards a group called, “Team Halo,” found me on TikTok. They contacted the TN Nurse Association Board and demanded that they remove me from the board which they did. I later realized that this group was connected to an international group and another country.
The medical director of a different big hospital group recruited me. They offered me amazing benefits which I could not turn down. Upon starting this position, the other providers shared their concerns with me. I observed for a while to gather my own opinions. I realized that it was taking 6 months for our patients to get their referral appointments made, which was concerning to me. I realized how the electronic health records were not set up efficiently. So, providers had to work from home to get their job completed in a timely manner which was leading to them feeling burnt out. I offered suggestions on how to improve things and was asked to be on a committee. Over time, I realized that many in upper management were truly not open to suggestions as I was asked to no longer contact them with any suggestions. While I was on vacation, some in upper management called a meeting with the other providers where the providers informed me that I was discussed. I expressed to upper management that I would like to have a meeting where I was part of it so everyone could talk freely. I was then told that I no longer had a job. Shortly after, most of the providers quit and the office manager and her immediate supervisor were let go.
During this time, my husband had opened his own personal training studio. I had decided to start a clinic within his business that offered Botox, Fillers, and Urgent Care. One of my NP friends introduced me to Amare natural supplements for our daughter who we adopted as behavioral health prescriptions were not helping her. Once I realized how they helped her, I started looking into the gut microbiome and cortisol and how it affected health. That began my desire to get my Functional Health Certification. My goal was to learn how I could help her more and in turn help my patients to truly heal. Also, when you have the entrepreneur’s spirit within you. It is hard to turn it off when you are working for others, especially when you see things being done that are negatively affecting patients and your coworkers.
I decided during this time that maybe I was meant to work in management. Perhaps I could help improve things not only for the patients but the employees as well. I got a job as an Assistant Director of Nursing of a company who had group homes for those with intellectual disabilities. This was near and dear to my heart since our daughter had an intellectual disability. I quickly learned that the director of nursing was covering up issues instead of addressing them. You would think that I would have learned by now not to speak up. But I like to sleep at night knowing I did the right thing. Once I realized that the director of nursing was not interested in listening to the teammates and things were not going to get fixed, I climbed the chain of command. Once again, this decision backfired on me and the director of nursing would go out of her way to try to make the workplace environment toxic. We had meetings together with upper management to try to resolve issues, but I quickly realized that nothing was going to get resolved.
So, I got another job working part time for a chiropractor doing federal worker’s comp. I helped them grow this part of his business. However, I realized that he was having financial issues as our paychecks would not always clear on time. I was hoping that as the business grew that would change but it did not. My youngest son asked me if we could move to Knoxville, TN for him to train at a different gymnastics facility. He felt that it would give him a better chance of being able to continue gymnastics for a NCAA men’s gymnastics team. I told my son to make sure that his dad approved of him to move as I did not want it to become a legal nightmare. His dad verbally approved and then texted me that our son could move to Knoxville, TN. I told my son that if it were meant to be then it would all fall into place. I called my husband regarding, and he said, “let’s move to Knoxville” and he ended up selling his business.
I talked to my boss, and he was willing for me to start a second location in Knoxville, TN. I went ahead and applied to other jobs for a backup plan due to financial insecurity. I was hired to be a Facility Administrator of a clinic for a company that was international. This allowed me to start my training in Memphis, TN. I got a text from a company that was interested in buying my house. My neighbor called me during a storm when we lost power to offer us to store our food at their house since they had a generator. I told him how we were moving to Knoxville, TN and he told me if the other company did not buy my house that he may be interested. The other company lowered their price on my house. So my neighbor bought my house and allowed me to rent it back until our new house was finished. My ex filed an objection to our son moving which delayed our move. My lawyer handled it, and we moved to Knoxville, TN in October 2023.
I found myself in another job where the patients and my teammates were not taken care of properly and the upper management did not seem open-minded to make any changes. Their solution was for me to work on the floor as an RN in addition to attempting to manage all my responsibilities as the Facility Administrator. This meant that I would have to work 24/7, which did not grant me any work-life balance. I allowed the job and my immediate supervisor to negatively affect me mentally and physically.
I felt called to quit this job and put my attention into completing my Functional Health Certification so I could try to help our daughter and myself due to my history of PTSD. I completed my Functional Health Certification and learned so much that I wish I could have been taught in my 7 years of college. During this time, my husband quit his job that he felt was toxic as well. We started looking for places to lease and were supposed to sign a lease on a place on a Sunday. The Wednesday before our daughter was admitted to the hospital and was placed on a ventilator for 2.5 weeks. She got discharged after 4 weeks thankfully. She had more specialists added to her lengthy list of healthcare providers. I knew that my focus needed to be on her and no full-time job would understand this or give me the flexibility to get her to all her medical and behavioral health appointments. My husband and I continued to look at places and he felt that our business needed to be in Farragut. We finally found the perfect place in Farragut. Two days before we got the keys, my collaborating physician decided that she was too busy to be my collaborating physician. I immediately reached out to everyone I knew. One of my Nurse Practitioner friends on social media put me in contact with a physician that she knew who agreed to become my collaborating physician. My husband and I have opened Absolute Health which offers a personal training studio, primary care, urgent care, telehealth, functional health, Botox, fillers, and IV infusions. We have plans to offer more holistic treatments like red light therapy in the future as well. We have two rooms that are available for likeminded entrepreneurs to offer massage, dietician, or other services.
I have learned through being a mom to not just one but two children with a diagnosis of autism all that entails and what has worked for both of them. I have learned that there is more than just Western Medicine which has its time and place. I have learned that Functional Health and Western Medicine can merge and work alongside one another for the benefit of the patient. I have learned how trauma truly physically changes the brain. I have learned how important it is to go all the way back to even when your mom was pregnant with you. Even that time can also physically affect our bodies. I have learned how supplements can help you to feel better. I have learned that our environment and what we put on our body and in our body can make us physically and mentally sick. I have learned how important our gut microbiome is to our overall health. I have learned how your cortisol level is affected by the stress that you have endured your entire life. That it is important to learn coping skills so you can manage stress better. My husband and I look forward to helping you to truly heal and conquer your ABSOLUTE HEALTH!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely has not been a smooth road by any means and involved many job losses and our daughter fighting for her life. But every bump in the road was a redirection to this point that we are at currently. Many doors have been slammed shut in our faces but for a reason. We just take it one second at a time and trust the plan even if it is not always how we thought it would be.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Absolute Health?
Absolute Health offers a personal training studio where our personal trainer, Keith, gets to know you personally and develops a plan to meet your physical and nutritional goals. He even spends time helping you to stretch after you exercise which is so important and most forget to do as part of their exercise routine. Our Family Nurse Practitioner has 25 year’s experience working in healthcare. She enjoys getting to know her patients and helping them to truly heal. She offers Functional Health, Primary Care, Urgent Care, Telehealth, Botox, Fillers, and IV Infusions. She believes that patients deserve to not feel rushed, so she offers her appointment times from a 30 to 60+ minutes. We are offering Grand Opening Specials and Member Specials. For example, if you sign up for Personal Training and Functional Health then you are what we call an “Absolute Health Member”. This means that you get a discount on our other services. Such as right now during our “Grand Opening Special” you would get Botox for $8 per unit and/or Filler for $500 per syringe! We also have two rooms available like-minded entrepreneurs to rent for their own business adventures. What sets Absolute Health apart from others is that we offer the entire package to conquering your Absolute Health!
How do you think about luck?
We don’t believe in “luck”. We believe that we were both called to step away from our previous toxic jobs for a reason and that is to help people. We believe in hard work, determination, and giving back.
Pricing:
- Functional Health: Members $100 a month; Non-Members $150 an appointment
- Urgent Care/Primary Care/Telehealth: $50 a visit
- Botox: Members: $8 per unit; Non-Members: $9 per unit
- Fillers: Members: $500 per syringe; Non-Members: $550 per syringe
- Personal Training: 20% off for life for Grand Opening Special
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.absolutehealth.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/absolutehealthfarragut/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AbsoluteHealthFarragut
