Callus on Your Soul: Jenny Opalinski

Jenny Opalinski has spent more than a decade inside hospitals where people lose the ability to speak, breathe, swallow, and sometimes survive. A medical speech language pathologist by training, she worked in ICU, neuro rehab, and long term acute care settings, including a Level 1 trauma center, where she watched clinicians absorb 10 to 15 traumatic events in a single shift and then get told to move the crash cart faster next time. That lived reality pushed her to co found The Wellness Shift, an advocacy and education platform focused on healthcare worker burnout, suicide, and assault. In this conversation, Opalinski walks through the moment that changed everything for her: standing in a hospital hallway listening to a family wail after a failed code, followed by a debrief that addressed logistics and ignored grief entirely. She also explains how that work led to Humanity Rx, her podcast about the human cost of medicine, and Dragon’s Breath: Calming Tricks for Big Feelings, a children’s book that translates evidence based breathing and regulation strategies into language kids can actually use. The episode covers moral injury, time scarcity, false wellness, respiratory muscle training, and why empathy keeps getting treated as an optional expense instead of clinical infrastructure. RELATED LINKS Jenny Opalinski on LinkedIn The Wellness Shift Humanity Rx Dragon’s Breath: Calming Tricks for Big Feelings Aspire Respiratory Products FEEDBACK Like this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.com See Privacy Policy at and California Privacy Notice at .

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Callus on Your Soul: Jenny Opalinski is an episode from Out of Patients with Matthew Zachary by Matthew Zachary.

This episode is 00:40:12 long.

This episode was published on Feb 24, 2026.

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