Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

I mentioned  here  that I wanted to collect my favorite quotes. Well, I find that I have few words of my own to say this month, so I'm stealing from other people and following up on a promise in the same incredibly long post. Work “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome .”  ~Booker T. Washington “A pessimist is one who makes  difficulties  of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”  ~Harry Truman Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work" -  Thomas Edison "I believe that we are here to work, and I believe there is no escape from it. I think that we cannot get that thought into our souls and into our beings too soon. Work we must, if we ...

When I tell people I'm a nurse, I'm usually asked, "so what do you do all day?" I usually give a really lame answer, like, "oh, you know, give meds. call the doctors." I don't think I'm doing my profession much of a service with such an answer. so here goes the real thing: I get on shift and start looking up some information on my patients before I get report: lab information, any procedures scheduled for the day, the patient diagnoses, the latest orders from the doctors, the medications I will give that day, latest vital signs, etc. This takes a while, so I have to finish after I've gotten report so that the night nurses can go home. I walk into each patient's room to get a quick nursing baseline of the individual, and then it's usually time to start calling people. If a procedure is supposed to be done but is not scheduled yet, I call down to the appropriate department to see what's going on. If I have questions on doctors' or...