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 lead to another and now I am starting my third book. My second book was basically written as a companion to my first one. This book will have some overlap including some content from my first two books probably about a quarter will be 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 literally 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 when a book starts nearing 400 or more pages, it becomes more and more difficult to continually engage the reader. 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 remember that I said in my second book that I would not write any more books about my life. After considerable deliberation, I have decided to back pedal 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 “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 was even better. I have included one of these strips purely for illustrative purposes.

This illustration is basically 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, that is me as well. Having had said this, my unique pathway through life has provided me untold opportunities to learn and grow. Some of these side roads could have been avoided and thusly, have saved a lot of angst. So this is the reason that I am writing this rule-breaking book, to help new nurses and individuals think of following down that career path to learn by my mistakes and to also learn from the things that I got right as well. 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. By the way, I have also considered writing a travel book in the not too distant future. I figure if I am going to break my rules, I might as well go all out.