Nurse Jenny, the Kiwi nurse who helped care for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson after he was hospitalised with Covid-19 in May 2020, says it is "therapeutic" being home.
"I love it!" Jenny McGee exclaimed on Breakfast on Friday.
Although she has some speaking engagements, McGee is home for a couple of months to put her feet up and be with her family, who are now in Nelson. McGee grew up in Invercargill.
"This is probably the first time I'm having a break from nursing, so I don't want to see a hospital, I don't want to see a ventilator."
After publicly resigning from the NHS in May last year, McGee worked in Curaçao, in the Caribbean, for several months before returning to London to do vaccination work.
She shot to global fame helping treat UK PM Boris Johnson when he had Covid-19. (Source: 1News)
McGee told Breakfast after the UK's first and second Covid-19 waves she was burnt out. She said it took walking away from intensive care nursing to see how mentally burnt out she really was.
The break from intensive care nursing has led her to be "in a really good place now".
"That's been really therapeutic for me. It's helped me kind of heal from the first and second wave because that was a really dark period of my life and my career but one that I'm immensely proud of. I've shown a lot of resilience and I've taken a lot from it."
After finally getting in and now out of MIQ, McGee said of returning to New Zealand: "It's therapeutic being home. I love it!"
McGee reflected back on Breakfast on the time she was singled out by Johnson.
"I've had my 15 minutes of fame and everything else that comes along is just bigger and more weirder," she said.
"I'm a little old nurse and I was doing my job and here I am on Breakfast TV. I cannot believe it."
She recalled she was getting ready for the night shift in the middle of lockdown and had emerged out of the shower to see her phone "going berserk".
McGee said she thought her friends were playing a trick on her until herself and her partner turned on the TV.
"I had no warning that that was going to happen," she said.
"I turned on the TV and there it was. My world just exploded ... It was wonderful, the messages and how proud people were. That was incredible," she said.
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