A Traveling Man

When he was a boy way back when, Darren Smith never imagined he would wind up a traveling nurse practitioner, moving about the southeastern United States, filling staffing holes in emergency rooms and, in his words, “being where I needed to be when I needed to be there.” 

He never imagined that, but then why would he? He was the son — again, his words — of a “sharecropper and a domestic.” Just another poor kid from the sticks, from a small town in Dillon County, South Carolina, with no real plan, no real road map. 

Well, except this one uncertain line on a seemingly trivial piece of paper. 

Sometime while he was in middle school, a guidance counselor dragged him to a special program put on by the local college down the road; Francis Marion University, it was called. People from the college came to Smith’s school each week, different people each time, and shared news about the various academic departments at the university. 

It wasn’t much, but it made an impression. When the time came, it brought Smith to FMU, not once, not twice, but three different times as he slowly and methodically pieced together an education that led him to his current place in the world of healthcare, and slowly, carefully changed his life. 

“The person I am now was right there, hidden in plain sight, all the time,” says Smith. “I was just a poor boy from a small town in the Pee Dee. Ordinary for around here. I’m one of the people FMU was made for. I’m local, first generation (in his family to attend college) and with no real hope or idea except ‘go to FMU.’ Thank goodness it was there.” 

Smith’s academic career and professional journey was arduous and anything but a straight line. He enrolled at FMU, but dropped out to take care of his new family. He obtained a two-year nursing degree, came back to FMU and finished a bachelor’s in biology, went back to work, went to nursing school online to acquire a bachelor of science in nursing, and then back to work and life again. Inspired by his wife, who was a nurse-turned-nurse practitioner, Smith enrolled in the first class of FMU’s new nurse practitioner program in 2012. 

After graduating, he found a position at the emergency room at McLeod Health Dillon. It was another case of being where he needed to be. His mother, after long years of toil, was suffering from dementia, and on her last legs. Smith went home to Dillon to care for her and to start his career as a nurse practitioner. 

Smith actually worked for a staffing agency that supplied personnel for Dillon’s ER and other sites. He spent most of his time there, but after his mother passed, he began rotating through a series of emergency rooms around the Low Country. Smith has worked in ERs for almost his entire career. It’s in his healthcare DNA he thinks. 

“I was an ER nurse, too,” he says. “ER personnel … are just different. Critical care, on a floor, that’s more about the minutiae. The ER is a more broad stroke. ‘Okay, Mr. Jones is alive. That’s the first mission. … Not sure about the last bowel movement, but he’s still with us.’ That kind of felt like the right thing to me. There’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment there, of helping people quickly.” 

Smith has moved up the ladder of TeamHealth, the Knoxville based healthcare staffing firm that acquired the Dillon contract while he was there. He’s now on TeamHealth’s Traveling Advanced Practice Team for the southeast region. It means more pay, but also more extensive travel, including some unexpected assignments. 

For instance, he was on assignment at a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, last fall when a storm blew in. Hurricane Helene it was called. 

You may have heard of it. 

“I was there at my apartment, watching the rain come down, wondering if I should get out or not,” says Smith. “I didn’t realize the scope of what was happening. No one did, really. But a day later, I’m on the phone with my supervisor and he’s telling me, ‘I’m going to need to get you to McDowell County (Marion, North Carolina, one of the areas hardest hit by Helene’s generational flood event). I’m not sure how we’ll get you there. Might be a chopper, or might be a cargo plane of some kind out of Atlanta and then by tracked vehicle or boat to the site. …’ Well, that’s all pretty crazy, I thought, but I signed up to be a traveler so …” 

Smith wound up working at hospitals and standalone ERs across the North Carolina mountains. It was grueling at times, but it was rewarding, too. 

“I had the pleasure of meeting some of the best people ever,” says Smith. “Just the salt of the earth. They were constantly ferrying stuff up, trying to get to people who might be in need. And there were so many people along the way who’d say, ‘No, I’m fine. Give that to someone else,’ It kind of gives you faith that not everyone is out to get what’s in it for them. 

“It wasn’t what I was expecting,” says Smith, “but it was where I was supposed to be. That’s kind of a recurring theme with me.”