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You have decided to become a nurse. You can picture yourself looking crisp, efficient and professional, nursing some poor sick person back to health. Or, perhaps, you see yourself in the operating room. It is like a scene from ER or Scrubs. You can imagine yourself helping-out the chief of surgery or the head of staff or....Perhaps, you should stop and think first.

Do you know what being a nurse really means? Nursing is part of the so-called "caring professions." Once stultified by the restrictions of a male-dominated society, it now offers a wide range of settings and fields, although it still focuses on helping others.

At its very basics, nursing involves taking blood pressure readings, doing physical examinations, providing injections, dealing with medical equipment, and changing wound dressings. Nurses record a patient's medical history and symptoms, help to perform diagnostic tests and analyze the results. They operate medical machinery, administer treatment and medications and help with patient follow-up and rehab.

Today, you can find nurses practicing in places ranging from hospitals to research labs. Nurses find work in the fields of occupational health, rehabilitation and home, school, office and hospice care. There are now nurse practitioners, midwives and anesthetists. Nurses can now specialize entering into emergency, operating room, ambulatory care, burn care, ICU, maternal care, pediatrics, oncology, renal, rehabilitation and even geriatrics. Nursing is no longer as simple or straight forward as it was in the past.