Growing up, being the daughter of a nurse AND a physician was not easy. Every scrape was a 'but did your arm fall off?' episode. My father was an OBGYN with the craziest of hours. Babies didn't wait to be born between 9am and 5pm. After years of having him absent for dinners, gone on holidays, I had decided I did not want anything to do with medicine. I was going to become an auto mechanic!

Yeah. I failed that class. Biting the bullet, I enrolled in nursing school. I do not regret one moment of being a nurse.

If you line up several vials of blood, you cannot tell which vial was drawn from the gay male, or the Muslim, or the Republican, or the 97-year-old. What people DO have in common is love, fear, curiosity, and vulnerability. The tough, regimented lawyer can become a nervous wreck once placed in a buttless hospital gown. The chatterbox can become silent and withdrawn.

These are the stories of one nurse's encounters with people at their most vulnerable. The alcoholic who never made it home to his children, the screw swallower, the patient receiving sedation who still managed to talk- maybe a bit too much. This is real life nursing.

You have to read it to believe it.