Nursing is more than just passing pills, medical jargon, and complicated treatments. There are so many pieces to connect, and like any good puzzle, a few might be lost in the shuffle, but fit together somehow in the end. You need to love science, especially life science. Intelligence and determination, managing stress and time... It takes energy and sometimes extreme effort to be a nurse. As one of many important steps between the doctor and patient, it's your job to be the doctor's eyes and the patient's advocate.

I left nursing school with a very specific idea of how I should be a nurse (or at least I thought). Everything is so precise and the rules are clearly written in black and white should you forget. But nursing isn't a black and white profession. You don't only have to apply the knowledge you learned about the human body and disease, you have to treat the patient as a whole. Sometimes, doing so can be very draining.

They tell you in school not to take your work home with you, to keep from being too personal, or getting attached. It's not that you need to be a robot; empathy should be a part of your job. It's that nursing is a highly stressful job than can leave you burned out if you don't find the right balance between knowing when to care, and when to be impartial. And that's difficult; difficult enough that after four years as a nurse I still have trouble with it.

If you're intelligent, if you don't have difficulty putting together concepts and can understand how the human body connects and the way it can break down, you'll do fine in school - at the academic end of it. The hands-on clinical part requires you to put into practice what you've learned, but it also means dealing with people. People are unpredictable in ways that have nothing to do with their medical problems. Nursing is customer service. It's service you have to give with a smile even when the person in the bed in front of you is unappreciative.

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I have this built in mechanism that makes me want to protect myself when attacked. It's very difficult to overcome this and handle a situation with tact when someone is screaming at you or calling you names. Especially when that someone is elderly and confused, making the entire situation more difficult than before because reason won't necessarily work.

In the course of my job, I find that the 'people element' is often more frustrating than understanding the disease process. Yet, at the

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