My dad always said when things feel off, take a shower.

I don’t think showering solves anything. But I do think it gives you a few quiet minutes where the world can’t reach you. The hot water drowns out noise. The mirror fogs. For a moment, you’re just there. Alone. Resetting.

If I took a shower every time things felt off, I’d never leave the bathroom.

It’s not that everything is wrong. It’s just that sometimes there’s a low hum of “off” running in the background. A frequency you get used to.

Recently I had a conversation where nursing came up. A few years ago, I made a comment — in a blog or Facebook post, I honestly can’t remember — that I “hate nurses.”

That didn’t go over well.

Apparently someone I worked with at the time took issue with it and escalated it to nursing administration. I was called in to explain myself. I was told it was “a bad optic” for someone in my role to say such things.

Optic. Schmoptic.

I never said nurses were bad to patients. I said nurses are often brutal to each other. From the first day of nursing school, you hear the phrase: “Nurses eat their young.” It’s said like folklore. Like tradition. Like a rite of passage.

I’ve never understood that.

There are bigger enemies in healthcare than the new grad trying not to cry in the supply room.

I also once said that nursing won’t truly evolve until it’s billed as its own line item on a hospital statement. Right now, nursing is bundled into the bed charge — tucked in with housekeeping, laundry, and “ancillary services.” Meanwhile, other disciplines bill directly.

That reality says more than any “Year of the Nurse” banner ever could.

Nursing is rough. It’s physically brutal, emotionally exhausting, politically complex. And in the middle of all that, we often turn on each other.

So what happens when it all ends?

Is There Life After Nursing?

The short answer: it depends.

In this era, it depends on retirement planning, disability, savings, luck, timing. It depends on whether you left by choice or were pushed out by circumstance.

And it depends on whether you know who you are without the badge.

I’ve known nurses and other healthcare professionals who left medicine and became truck drivers. That sounds absurd until you realize I know about a dozen. Some never looked back. One came back briefly, then returned to the road two years later.

Lower stress is a powerful drug.

Back in the Jurassic era when I was in college — we wrote in mud and dodged dinosaurs between classes — I had a criminal justice professor who said something that stuck with me. He talked about high-adrenaline careers — law enforcement, first responders, military — and how many struggle deeply with retirement. Some, he claimed, don’t survive it long.

It’s not the job that kills them.

It’s the silence afterward.

I’ve spent most of my life in high-adrenaline environments. Army. Nursing. Advanced practice. Constant motion. Constant responsibility. Constant readiness.

And now?

I’m beginning to enjoy the quiet.

That surprises me.

For a long time, I thought I needed to stay in the middle of everything. I clung to associations, to professional identity, to the social gravity of being needed.

But here’s the harsh truth:

The more I’m away from home, the less I want to be away from home.

There are mornings I wake up thinking, Shouldn’t I be doing something?
Then I remember — there is nothing scheduled. No shift. No charting. No mandatory training.

That’s the hard part.

Going from working yourself nearly to death… to having to make your own schedule.

It’s not “retirement” in the gold-watch sense. It’s different when it’s not entirely voluntary. Different when it’s disability. Different when your body made the decision before your brain did.

You don’t just leave a job. You leave a role. A hierarchy. A language. A tribe.

And sometimes you leave being needed.

The Free Clinic of Text Messages

One thing hasn’t changed: people still text me medical questions.

Usually, I don’t mind. Sometimes it even feels good. Like maybe I’m not a complete loss to the universe.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: I can’t diagnose you through text. Even if I could hazard a differential, I can’t treat you. I can’t follow up. I can’t monitor.

And technically? It edges toward practicing without a license.

That’s a ballet I don’t want to open.

A lot of people ask because healthcare is expensive. I understand that. I’ve lived that system. But there’s a line between friendly advice and unpaid professional consultation.

If you ask a mechanic to diagnose your engine for free, repeatedly, eventually he’s going to get tired. If you ask a lawyer to review contracts for free, eventually that goodwill evaporates.

Education costs money. Experience costs time. Expertise costs sacrifice.

It’s not rude to protect that.

It’s responsible.

Still — I won’t lie. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason some people reach out is because they want medical input.

That’s the strange space after nursing.

You’re not fully in it.

You’re not fully out of it.

You’re… glowing faintly in the dark.

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Meanwhile, in the Wasteland

The wasteland, at least, is predictable.

This week marks the start of the two-week Fastnacht event — a Swiss-inspired Fat Tuesday celebration that’s become ritual in Appalachia. Every hour, you complete simple tasks to free five robot marchers. You escort them in a parade. You fight radtoads, super mutants, and a final boss.

And at the end?

You get a mask.

Most are common.

Some are rare.

A few are very rare.

And that’s what keeps you logging in hour after hour — the hope of something glowing, something uncommon, something special dropping into your inventory.

Life is like that.

You grind and grind hoping for the rare mask.

But maybe the lesson is this:

You got a mask at all.

Maybe that’s enough.

I’m still learning that part.

When I don’t get it right, I have my dog. And I have my mom — in memory, in presence, in that strange way grief becomes companion instead of catastrophe.

The adrenaline is gone.

The badge is gone.

But I’m still here.

Mask on.

Glowing.

Learning to be quiet.