I remember being TERRIFIED my first day of clinical practice for nursing school. 

When I say terrified, I mean literally I wanted to throw up.  Lucky for me, I have a strong gag reflex.

I remember it as such an out of body experience.  I could hear my head screaming, “This is crazy!  You don’t know what you’re doing!”  and feeling paralyzed. But yet I could still manage to get my body to move somehow.

At the time I didn't understand this, but the fear came from all these thoughts that I would do it wrong, it wouldn’t work and I’d never become a nurse. 

It really all boiled down to one thought:

“You will fail.  Then you will be a failure.”

In the end I didn't fail.  I mean I did some, but I learned from it.

I figured it out. 

I didn’t let my crazy thoughts take over and I graduated nursing school.  I got a job.  I worked for 10 years as a RN.  I never became...

**If you would like to listen to this blog post, scroll to the bottom for the audio version.

Do you remember when you were pregnant? 

I do.  And my word is, “Ugh.”  I want to apologize to the ladies who have either (a) not been pregnant or (b) loved being pregnant.  To those ladies, let me paint the picture of my pregnancy (to some of you who also had horrible pregnancies, you can totally skip this part because you know what I’m talking about here). 

It started at 4 weeks.  Yep, I knew instantly when I was pregnant because the, “I only want to sleep FOREVER” and “Oh my goodness, that smell makes me want to vomit” started.  Those two only intensified from there.  Getting out of bed was like trying to get slime out of carpet…slow and almost impossible.  Plus, who really wants to get out of bed when you know you are going to just vomit or feel like vomiting the rest of the day.  

No, this...