"I have always seen it as a win if I get an opportunity to add my footprint where women didn’t walk before."
------------------
As a man ... that was how I felt about nursing. I was pushed and pulled in another direction though. I liked the patients and the bedside care the most. The life and death stuff was more exciting. It put things into perspective because I only had an autoimmune disorder.

I wanted to be assigned to any patient on corticosteroids when most of the nurses didn't want to take care of those patients. The nurses I worked with knew I took prednisone and said if I ever needed to be hospitalized they wouldn't take care of me. They weren't serious but they knew prednisone wasn't good for me. They always wanted to know how much prednisone I was taking.

Some doctors would rather that I crunched numbers for their medical research. I couldn't tell the doctors that I mostly felt that the data they collected was garbage because the nurses didn't follow the research protocol precisely. I was caught in an in-between world of medical research and patient care.

Some of the research projects were downright dangerous to the patients. I had to recruit those patients so I felt responsible for them. The research needs to happen though ... otherwise nothing changes.

I also did some managed care for an insurance company for a year or two. That wasn't a nice world because all they cared about was the cost of medical care.