About · Meet Amanda

I was thrown into the wild jungle,
knowing I would come out refined.

The scenic route to becoming a CRNA — and the calling to walk it with the people coming after me.

The anesthesia equipment Amanda worked with in Kenya
Kenya · December 2016

It started at the head of an operating table.

One bottle of fentanyl to last the entire day. One oxygen tank to last the entire week. No ventilators. The power kept going out. Outside, people were lined up — desperate for help, for care, for someone to show up.

My patient was a woman with a large goiter she had carried for years. As I walked her into the OR and placed her on the table, she was calm. Smiling. So excited to finally have it removed.

And then I felt it — that scared voice that has visited every nurse who has ever stood at the head of a bed for the first time alone. "Omg, what are you doing? You can't do this."

I looked around the room. Surgical techs setting up. Another CRNA inducing in the room next door. The door swung open and closed. I looked down at my patient. And something inside me went quiet.

I knew the machine. I had Plans A, B, C, and D in my head, and the prevention for each. I knew my drugs. I had done this every single day for the last eighteen months — and when I wasn't doing it, I was studying it, reading about it, or talking about it.

Eight rotations. Three thousand clinical hours. A thousand anesthesia cases. A hundred mini-breakdowns. It had all led here.

So I placed her monitors. I pre-oxygenated her. I asked the tech to hand me the tube when I was ready. And I put this woman to sleep, intubated her, and got her ready for the incision. By myself. In the middle of Africa.

Amanda Kay MSN CRNA with a patient in Kenya - CRNA coach and mentor for aspiring nurse anesthetists
That moment is why this work exists. Because somewhere out there, right now, is the version of you that you don't yet believe in. And I built this whole space to help you become that confident CRNA.
The before

I took the scenic route to CRNA.

I grew up in southern Illinois, graduated nursing school at Illinois State, and started my career at Mayo Clinic in Rochester — orthopedic trauma, charge nurse, preceptor. I thought I knew what I was doing.

Then I started traveling. Mayo Phoenix. Calvary Hospital in Brooklyn doing palliative care. Med-surg in Annapolis. Johns Hopkins ED, where I worked trauma and triage. Banner Good Samaritan in Phoenix. Vassar Brothers in Poughkeepsie. I picked up forensic nursing along the way — SANE training, victim advocacy.

I was building skills I didn't know I was building. I was also running. From relationships that weren't working. From the version of myself I hadn't yet faced. From the calling I was avoiding.

"Why do I always end up miserable? I have this great career. I have all these goals. Why do I keep ending up in this exhausted, never-quite-happy place?"

I asked myself that question sitting alone in a dark Arizona apartment in 2014, with no internet, fighting with my then-boyfriend, watching the plan I'd built for my life fall apart.

Two weeks later, a friend told me to apply to a CRNA program in Rhode Island. I didn't think I'd get in. I'd never even been east of New York. I applied anyway.

I got in.

The breaking

What happened next broke me.

My grandmother died the same week I told my boyfriend about Rhode Island. The relationship ended badly. He blocked me. I had drained my savings on a sick dog, plane tickets, and trying to be ready for a life that was no longer happening.

The day before orientation, my flight to Rhode Island was cancelled. I drove from Chicago to Michigan in the middle of the night with my dog. Caught a different flight. Lost my luggage. Landed in Providence with twenty minutes to spare, smelling terrible after twenty-four hours on the road. A classmate I had never met picked me up from the airport. I borrowed clothes from my friend. Walked into orientation with two minutes to spare.

That is how I started CRNA school.

And then it got harder.

I lived on my friend's couch. I failed biochem. I cried in my car in the clinical parking lot most mornings — not knowing what the day would bring, sure I was the only one drowning. Three weeks before graduation, my husband and I — yes, we found our way back to each other, but that's its own story — got evicted from our apartment. We couldn't afford a moving truck. We threw our mattresses in the trash at two in the morning and packed what would fit in our two cars.

I graduated December 16, 2016 — in the founding CRNA class of Rhode Island College / St. Joseph School of Nurse Anesthesia.

And then I sat in a tiny studio apartment outside of Boston for five months — credentialing taking forever, credit cards maxed, using credit-card points to buy gas station gift cards — wondering if any of it had been worth it.

The lesson

Then I got everything I had ever wanted.
And I was still miserable.

I passed boards. I got my first CRNA job in Chicago. I worked 98 hours in my first two weeks — awake intubations, hearts, central lines, blocks. Every skill I had learned in school, I used in those fourteen days. I came out the other side knowing I could do this work.

My husband proposed. We bought the house we are still in today. I had the career. The ring. The home. The marriage I had fought for.

And one afternoon I curled up in that exact bed and asked myself, again, why am I still not happy?

I had been treating my life like a checklist. If I just got the acceptance letter, I'd be happy. If I just got through school, I'd be happy. If I just got the job — the ring — the house — the next thing — I'd be happy.

Nothing outside of me was ever going to do that work. The hardest, slowest, holiest part of my journey wasn't getting into CRNA school. It was learning that the woman who got there still had to learn how to live.

"I want you to stop looking for the perfect study method and the perfect strategy. I want you to start looking within yourself."
My philosophy

What I believe.

I believe peace isn't something you stumble into. It's a practice you build — in the repetition, the quiet, the discomfort, the staying, the moments nobody claps for. It's the work of becoming, not the prize at the end of becoming.

I believe you weren't given this calling by accident. The exhaustion, the doubt, the impostor syndrome, the question of whether you belong here — none of it is proof that you don't. It's the natural friction of a soul stretching into something bigger than it has been before.

I believe the hard things are never wasted. Every couch I slept on, every dollar I didn't have, every two-in-the-morning OR fear, every season I thought I would not survive — all of it became the material I now hand to you. None of it was punishment. All of it was training.

I believe in the who, not just the what. You can figure out any "what." But the question that changes everything is who do I want to become while I do this? Success follows when you step into who you want to be. It doesn't lead you there.

And I believe — with my whole chest — that you are not broken. You are being built.

Amanda Kay MSN CRNA
By the numbers

The training behind the teaching.

3,000+
Clinical hours during training
1,000+
Anesthesia cases as an NAR
6 yrs
Coaching aspiring CRNAs
The formal side

A bit of the credentials, if it helps.

  • MSN, Nurse Anesthesia — Rhode Island College / St. Joseph School of Nurse Anesthesia (founding CRNA class, December 2016)
  • BSN, Nursing — Illinois State University, Mennonite College of Nursing (Cum Laude, Alumni Clinical Excellence Award, 2008)
  • Clinical background: Mayo Clinic orthopedic trauma · Johns Hopkins emergency department · palliative care · ICU · forensic nursing (SANE-trained)
  • Currently practicing across hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, GI, plastics, and locum work — and founder of Kelly Anesthesia Partners, S. Corp.
  • Published nurse researcher — presented at the Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science (Washington, D.C.) and the Midwest Nursing Research Society
  • Featured on Healthgrades · Mechanics of Anesthesia · MoneyRx for CRNAs · The CRNA Club Podcast

Certified SDS Life Coach & SDS Coach — because the mindset work I do with you isn't just intuition. It's trained, structured, and built on a proven framework.

Certified Professional SDS Coach Certified SDS Life Coach
The work now

And now the work I'm here to do.

I built The Mindful CRNA for the nurse who is where I was — sleeping on a friend's couch, crying in the car before clinical, wondering if they made a mistake, doing all the right things and still not feeling enough.

I am not a therapist. I am not a tutor. I am a CRNA who has walked this road and now teaches the part nobody else teaches: the mindset, the emotional regulation, the leadership identity, the peace that has to be built brick by brick while everything else is on fire.

I have coached aspiring CRNAs into acceptance letters they had stopped believing in. I have walked Nurse Anesthesia Residents through the hardest months of their training and out the other side. I have watched women and men find their voice, their boundary, and their breath in this work.

And I will tell you the same thing I tell every one of them: I will hold belief for you until you find belief for yourself.

If you've read this far

You probably belong here.

If something in this story sounded like yours, let's stay in touch. Every other week I send a short letter on the inner work of becoming a CRNA — no pressure, no pitch, just real talk for where you are.

Subscribe to the newsletter See which program fits