One of the most powerful verses in the Bible is the verse, “I am that I am.” It encompasses so much understanding of God within such a few words. It implies that God accepts who He is and compares Himself to no other God. It says that He is enough and we need no more.

Several years back I saw written in a dream “You are who you are.” This dream has been pivotal in my life, for I grew up in a very critical and rejecting atmosphere and struggle with comparing myself to others.

In the past two months I have been mentoring another nurse who works for my company. She is in awe of me and I am in awe of her. My brain processes things very fast and as a result I skim through a lot of life at top speed. She, on the other hand, processes at a different level. She is very detailed and slow in her thinking. I am not implying that she is stupid in any way, she is brilliant, but she just processes differently than I do.

The other day I had a patient who told me that her daughter was upset with my company because somehow we should have known that her panic attacks were due to heart problems. How on earth I was supposed to know that without an MRI or EKG is beyond me but I started beating myself up over the complaint. I kept thinking if I was a nurse like my friend was, maybe I would have slowed down enough to pester the doctor to death to get this patient seen earlier. As it was the lady went in for heart surgery and is on the mend now so the volatile daughter should be taking a chill pill.

Nonetheless my nurse friend called me at 10:30 pm that night and told me, “She thought she was going over the deep end.” Apparently a patient’s daughter had torn her up from one end to the other because she had sent her mother to the ER and the hospital had said that there was nothing wrong with her mother.

I had been so stressed out for a week and a half with my company that I erupted in laughter. I couldn’t stop either. The more she told me the harder I laughed. Then she started laughing too and pretty soon we were struggling to breathe because we were laughing so hard.

I told her not to let this woman steal her joy and that is what she had told me over Christmas when the company we both work for had done everything they could possibly do to ruin my Christmas. We laughed some more and then expressed our love for each other and hung up.

I realized that God loves me just as I am and I do the very best that I can possibly do in my position as a home health nurse but I am not God and I do not have a pocket MRI in my scrubs. In other words I am limited in my ability to play God as some doctors do.

I also understand that people love their mothers but that does not give them a right to attack those of us who are caring for their mothers. I busted my ass on this case and went above and beyond for this patient in many respects and to have her daughter turn around and indicate that I should have known that her mother’s panic attacks were heart related is just ludicrous. I think that the reason why I busted out laughing with my girlfriend was because all day I had been thinking I should be more like her and she had been verbally attacked by a patient’s daughter also. So it didn’t matter what kind of nurse either her or I was, it only mattered that we were in the vicinity of two daughters who were angry.

Sometimes I don’t know how I would survive in this world without the friends that God places in my path.The gift of laughter at the end of a stressful day is like icing on a pie, a “cow pie” that is.