Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

All of the nurses I know are religious. That is what happens when you go to a private religious university for nursing school and then work in a cancer hospital;--if you don't have some sort of hope in a beneficent God, and in life after death, then working with cancer patients can get pretty depressing. But because of what we see every day at work, we are more likely to focus on relieving suffering than on prolonging life. Which is how I found myself praying for my patient to die. This patient, alias Bob, was on the highest oxygen flow possible without having a machine (aka ventilator) breathe for him [For those medically-minded, that means he was on high-flow oxygen 40L 100% FiO2 and ALSO had on 15L NRB mask]. Yet he was still in significant distress; he was using all of his chest and abdominal muscles to pull in more oxygen, and on top of that, he had blood constantly pouring out of his nose and mouth. He looked exhausted, agitated, and downright ghastly. After my morning...

Once upon a time I was in kindergarten and we had a show-and-tell assignment. I don't remember if the purpose was to show baby pictures or not, but according to the story [poor memory--sorry] I brought pictures of myself as an infant. When I got home after school, my mother asked how the show-and-tell went. "Oh, it was great. Everybody thought I was the cutest baby they've seen." Not that my mom didn't think I hadn't been cute as an infant, but suspicious that such a sentiment was widespread, she asked me, "They said that?" To which I replied, "No, but they were thinking it." Two decades later, I have the (optional) assignment to bring to work one of my baby pictures as part of an effort from the retention committee to make work Fun. Even though one of my co-workers has been asking for my baby picture for years [I see him like once a month, we don't know each other's names, and quite frankly the request is creepy], I didn't...