I didn’t leave the ICU.
I brought it with me.
RN, BSN · MSN-AGPCNP in progress · Practicing under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Carlos Jimenez, MD
For nine years, my job was to notice what other people missed.
I spent years in trauma and surgical critical care, neuro critical care, and medical ICUs — first at RWJ New Brunswick, then as a travel ICU nurse across the Northwell system. In critical care, you’re trained to catch the smallest shift before it becomes an emergency: a slightly-off vital sign, a patient who says “I just don’t feel right” days before anything shows up on a monitor.
That instinct — take the small thing seriously before it becomes the big thing — is the whole reason this practice exists.
I once cared for a woman in her mid-forties, a mother, who’d been telling doctors for months that something was wrong before anyone listened. By the time it was caught, there was far less we could do than if someone had taken her seriously earlier. I think about her every time a patient tells me their labs are “normal” but they still don’t feel right.
I also cared for a patient in her twenties who had a stroke — the kind of patient who “shouldn’t” have had one by any conventional risk profile. It reshaped how I think about risk, about what standard panels actually catch, and about how early real prevention has to start.
I didn’t leave critical care because I stopped caring about catching things early. I left so I could catch them earlier — before the ICU is ever the answer.
The paper matters. Here’s mine.
- BSN, Capella University (2020) · ASN, St. Paul’s School of Nursing (2017)
- MSN-AGPCNP, Capella University (in progress)
- CCRN — Board Certified Critical Care Registered Nurse · ACLS · BLS
- Functional medicine training: Institute for Functional Medicine (in progress); A4M (planned)
- Licensed RN in New York; New Jersey reactivating; pursuing the Nurse Licensure Compact (NJ, PA, FL, CT)
That’s the “Regulated” in Regulated with Loreta.
Every plan I build is done under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Carlos Jimenez, MD. That’s not a formality to me. You get the accessibility of working with a nurse who has time for you, with the clinical guardrails of physician oversight behind every recommendation. Not everyone in this space can say that.
Dr. Jean-Carlos Jimenez, MD
Board-certified in Family Medicine · Section Chief, Hospital Medicine, Sharon Hospital
A Staten Island native, Dr. Jimenez completed his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and further training at Saint Joseph’s Medical Center, an NYMC affiliate in Yonkers. He is board-certified in Family Medicine and serves as Section Chief of Hospital Medicine at Sharon Hospital, with more than ten years of clinical experience.
His approach — treat each patient as an individual, and pair well-rounded care with real attention to the whole person — is the clinical backing every plan here runs through. Fittingly for this practice, he’s also a serious home cook.
The European lens isn’t a marketing angle. It’s where I’m from.
I come from a Balkan family and grew up in Queens into my early twenties before I ever put on scrubs. The way my family ate — real meals, olive oil, bread on the table, nothing off-limits — is completely different from the restriction-and-guilt version of “eating healthy” most of my patients grew up with here. I watched, close up, how much that difference matters: not just what’s on the plate, but how people actually relate to food and rest and each other.
I’m proud to be building this practice out of Staten Island — the borough that gets overlooked, same as a lot of my patients feel overlooked by a healthcare system that ran one panel and told them they’re fine.
I’m not interested in guessing.
I’m interested in testing what actually needs testing, building a plan around what we find, and staying close enough through follow-ups and messaging that the plan actually gets followed — because a protocol nobody follows doesn’t help anyone. My job is to regulate what’s gotten dysregulated, and to do it with real food, real rest, and real clinical oversight — not a supplement stack and a hope.