Happy Nurses Week! 2011

Just remember - for every bitchy, rude, condescending, eye-rolling, short-tempered and unaware nurse there are hundreds of highly skilled, compassionate, funny, wickedly talented, better trained, more educated and likely smarter-than-you ones out there.  Nursing is a vocation, not just a job.  I am the daughter of one and adopted sister of some who I would trust above no other with mine or my family's care.

I have had the great fortune to work along with some of the best in the business, brilliant men and women who demonstrate excellence in care - even in the most adverse conditions with some of the most uncooperative patients.  Happy Nurse's Week to those men and women who often do the job nobody else can or will.

Nurses - doing it on the front lines longer than we have ...

It is Good

It is good that he is dead, but it is not justice.  A moment of roaring pain and then blackness is nothing compared to the cascade of grief and violence that his actions spawned over the last decade.  Incalculable losses of life, not just the victims but for the survivors as well.  A nation changed forever in the span of a morning, additions to our lexicon in a language born of idealistic hate.  A legacy of fear and violence that spans continents and now generations.  No, a moment of pain and then release is not justice.  But perhaps, before that last blinding noise seared his brain and removed him as an futile icon in a senseless fight ... just perhaps he knew one final thing.  That he had not won.