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Stephanie Price trod an untraditional path into nursing, studying journalism at Butler University and working as a reporter.

When she stepped away from newspapering to start her family, she felt tugged in a different direction. Twenty years later she studied nursing at Indiana University South Bend (IUSB).

Now Price, RN, BSN, CEN, has a third credential behind her name to navigate a relatively new field, forensic nursing, which she joined last November at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center, Mishawaka.

CEN (Certified Emergency Nurse) is the foundational specialty certification for registered nurses working in emergency departments.

Wearing a Southwestern Michigan College T-shirt March 18 because her daughter is pursuing nursing as an SMC student, Price talked in FYE, the Office of First-Year Experience, about the 10 ½ years in her second professional life after she bid farewell to reporting for the Elkhart Truth.

“My beats were education and the military, right around the time of 9/11,” she said. “I always loved being on general assignment because you covered cops. I can talk to anyone, including famous people, and I’m not shy asking questions. You learn to synthesize information.”

As a nurse, “I’ve always worked in the ER, one way or another,” she said. “It’s a diverse profession, from working in the ER to on a cruise ship or as an educator. It’s an art and a science. There’s an art to learning how to read people and talk to them. You need a desire and willingness to serve or help others. You have to be adaptable because you’re never going to have two patients who are exactly the same, changing technology and new medications. Things are very different post-COVID than they were pre-COVID.”

Price played a clip from HBO Max’s “The Pitt,” a realistic depiction of challenges facing health-care workers as seen through the lens of frontline heroes working in a Pittsburgh hospital. Like the show she grew up on, “ER,” Noah Wyle plays a doctor.

“We like a 4:1 ratio (of patients to nurse),” Price said. “I might have a 2-year-old with an ear infection, a 22-year-old with a kidney stone in the next room, a 62-year-old with chest pains and a 92-year-old with a urinary tract infection. All in the span of two hours, all day long, all the time. At St. Joe, where I am fulltime in forensics, we see 100-120 patients a day.

“People who go into ERs like the diversity,” she said. “If you go into another specialty, you might just see babies or hearts. It’s tragic and beautiful. My first pediatric death was a Decatur 6-year-old run over by a tractor. You never forget the wailing of a parent when a child dies.

“But it can be beautiful. If you’re having a stroke, it’s like a heart attack, but blood is not getting to your brain. I remember a woman who couldn’t talk. We gave her a clot-busting drug and she came back. You see children really caring for their parents and parents really caring for their medically-fragile children.”

Forensic nurses work at the intersection of nursing and the criminal justice system to provide nursing care to victims.

Forensic nurses also provide emotional and psychological support, collect evidence and may perform evaluations of alleged perpetrators when necessary.

“It’s a relatively new nursing specialty,” with the International Association of Forensic Nurses established in 1992. “At St. Joe Mishawaka, we are the only forensics department in the area. We cover all sexual assaults. It could be molestation of children or a domestic violence fight between intimate partners. We look at child or elder abuse and neglect, animal bites, child deaths, gunshots, knives, burns and human trafficking.

“Strangulation is a week-long course because it’s that significant, whether domestic violence or a bar fight. You can strangle people with your hands or your phone charger cord. You cannot consent because it’s suicidal. You either pass out or die.”

Price describes forensic nursing as a triangle — evidence, story the patient tells and circumstances.

“We’re part of a bigger multi-disciplinary team,” Price said. “That includes law enforcement, social workers, DCS (Indiana Department of Child Services) and the CAC (Child Advocacy Center).

“We establish rapport with patients and family and explain our role in their overall care,” Price said. “We’re very careful to make sure that they understand our primary concern is their safety. We take their stories, but we are not the forensic interviewer, which is usually a social worker. We separate parents and children because we don’t want them coached. I never ask a patient, ‘What did you do?’ I always ask, ‘What happened to you?’ There’s a big difference.”