When I started working on my blog, I never thought it would progress to this extent. I started my blog to disseminate truthful information on not only COVID-19 but on the Trump presidency as well. After the first year of working on my blog, I started a podcast, which I now have over 70 recordings posted. During all this time, I kept toying around with the idea of writing a book about my family and myself. One thing led to another, and now I am starting my third book. My second book was written as a companion to my first one. This book will have some overlap, including content from my first two books, with about a quarter of it coming from these two sources. It is no mystery that I am a nurse; I mention it in many of my medical blogs and Facebook postings, so it should come as no surprise to my loyal readers that I would eventually get around to writing a book dedicated to my nursing career. I have included many anecdotal stories from my nursing career; however, there are dozens more that I have not been able to post due to length restrictions. While there is no hard and set rule on how long a book should be, I believe that when a book starts nearing 400 pages or more, it becomes increasingly challenging to engage the reader continually. With this in mind, I have kept my first two books around the three-hundred-page limit. This limit has made it difficult to include everything I wanted, ergo, my third book. You may recall that in my second book, I mentioned I wouldn’t be writing any more about my life. After considerable deliberation, I have decided to backpedal on that statement. I am doing this mainly because of the circular path my life has taken. If there are two choices to take, invariably, I will make the wrong one, and something always goes wrong along the way as well. In many cases, my life could be analogous to the cartoon “the “”The Family Circle,” a cartoon quite popular in my youth. Some of my favorite cartoons that Bill Keane posted were his dotted pathways of a particular child in the family. If one step was okay, 10 steps were even better. I have included one of these strips purely for illustrative purposes.

This illustration is my life in a nutshell. If you follow the steps he took in the cartoon, you would think that he had never heard of a straight line or a ruler, which is true for me as well. Having said this, my unique pathway through life has provided me with untold opportunities to learn and grow. Some of these side roads could have been avoided, and thus have saved a lot of angst. This is why I am writing this rule-breaking book: to help new nurses and individuals considering a career in nursing learn from my mistakes and successes. I hope you find this book helpful and uplifting. It is full of joy and heartbreak, and hopefully, if I do this right, you will be laughing and crying at the same time.

If you are reading this book, you are reading the third installment of my nursing career. I have been a nurse for well over twenty years now, and every day I seem to experience something new. I am no longer working in an acute hospital. After three years of navigating the COVID pandemic as an ICU nurse, I’ve reached a point in my career where I’m looking for something less demanding. I no longer aspire to take care of patients who require one-on-one care or the administration of countless intravenous drips. I want to work in a less stressful environment. So I have switched to a long-term-acute-care facility, or as they are more commonly known, LTAC. When I was working on my second edition, I had just started working at an LTAC, and I was recovering from PTSD. I have now worked there for over three years, and I have pretty much put the specter of PTSD behind me. Though I still have dreams about my patients, maybe that is a good thing, I don’t know. I do know one thing: the relationships you have with LTAC patients are markedly different than those you have in a regular hospital. In an LTAC, you may care for the same patient for several months. The ICU I work in is relatively small, having just four rooms. So the likelihood is that you will care for the same patient for several consecutive weeks. This prolonged care of a patient presents many unique challenges that most nurses never experience. For one thing, you may become quite attached to them. You may also develop close relationships with their family members. These relationships can be pretty rewarding, but they can also be quite heart-wrenching when the patient passes away. Even though the patients you care for in an LTAC are typically more stable than at a hospital, many of them are reaching the end of their lives, so you do experience frequent deaths.

In this new edition, I will continue to regale the reader with my innumerable experiences. Now that we have President Trump back in office and a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., I will discuss some of the changes taking place in the health care field under his tenure. I will also update several of the chapters in part three.