Hadley Vlahos

When Hadley Vlahos tells people what she does for a living, most are surprised. Vlahos has worked as an at-home hospice nurse for nearly 10 years, a job that many think is too tough, too sad, and filled with too much devastation. But for Vlahos working in palliative care is a something she feels lucky to do.

Vlahos’ journey to becoming a hospice nurse did not follow a linear path. Her childhood dream was to become a writer and when she started college, a career in nursing never crossed her mind.

While in many families death is a taboo topic, in Vlahos’ family death was literally a part of life. Her grandparents were licensed embalmers and funeral directors and topics around dying were naturally part of dinnertime conversations.

Vlahos was also raised in a strict religious household, attending a private Episcopalian school in Baton Rouge until she was ten years old. At fifteen, the sudden death of a friend made Vlahos question many of her beliefs. After high school Vlahos attended Florida State University and at nineteen she became a single mom. Her life was setting off on a different trajectory and she enrolled in nursing school to be able to support herself and her baby. After graduation Vlahos worked in immediate care and a nursing home, but it wasn’t until she started working in hospice care that she realized she was doing exactly what she was meant to do.

Hadley Vlahos started documenting her experiences as a hospice nurse and stories of her patients on on TikTok and now reaches over 1.5 million followers (June 2023) as “Nurse Hadley.”

In her New York Times-bestselling memoir The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments, Hadley shares new stories of the most impactful experiences she has had with her patients—from the woman who never once questioned her faith until she was close to death, to the older man seeing visions of his late daughter, to the young patient who laments that she spent too much of her short life worrying about what others thought of her.

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