My parents met at Fort Riley, Kan., during World War II. My father was an Army civilian; he had been trampled by a horse in his youth and couldn’t enlist. My mother was studying to be a nurse and, when war broke out, joined the Women’s Army Corps without even telling her parents.
I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they’re convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom, my dad, they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.
I had graduated high school early, and my thought was to become a hospice nurse.
I was born, and the doctor left. And then the nurse is like, ‘Doctor, I think there’s another one.’
‘O sleep, O gentle sleep,’ I thought gratefully, ‘Nature’s soft nurse!’
Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.
A lot of my family on both sides have worked in education and nursing, and my grandmother was a nurse; my sister is a nurse, and her – my other sister’s daughter is going into nursing. There’s a lot of that in the family.
When teachers try to teach, nurses try to nurse, small businesses try to serve their clients and the police try to arrest criminals, there is always a regulator or three breathing down their necks. Conservatives want to make people’s lives easier.
My dad’s a professor of medicine; my mum was a nurse. My little sister is going into healthcare. My older sister is a nurse; my brother’s in finance – I’m the runt of the litter.
My father, who was illiterate, smoothed iron for Ford Dagenham and we’d get up at 5;30 A.M. to give him a jump-start. My mother was a nurse and part of the Windrush generation. Growing up in east London, we were financially poor, but rich in hope and dignity, and we were happy.
My mum is proud to have been a nurse. At the beginning, she worked a basic 44-hour week, split shifts, night shifts and rarely had a weekend off.
After that I couldn’t show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.
I don’t see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.
I did a movie called ‘The Savages’ with Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, where I played a nurse, and it showed me in a different role from what I played on ‘The Wire.’ It showed my range as an actor.
Part of the redesign of FEMA is that they have so many people on standby, whether it is a retired nurse or a doctor who will take time off to go exactly where they are needed.
French people don’t breastfeed. And I did it. My mum freaked out. She didn’t get it at all. French royalty thought it wasn’t chic to breastfeed their kids, so they would send them to a wet nurse. It’s looked down on.
When I started, it was all meter maids or the sassy nurse, or the sassy receptionist in the hospital. And I felt like: Are those the only jobs that large, black women have?
We both felt it was important for us to remain a couple. I didn’t want to be just his nurse.
At the heart of my family is a woman who has spent 60 years taking care of others. Nurse Grandma, as we affectionately call her – my mum Sue – is who everyone in our family calls when there’s a cough that won’t go, or a temperature that needs bringing down.
When I was a young girl, I used to dream about what I would be when I grew up. I thought that I wanted to be a nurse, then a teacher, even a pilot at one point.
As though there were a tie And obligation to posterity. We get them, bear them, breed, and nurse: What has posterity done for us. That we, lest they their rights should lose, Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?
Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who’ve done it need to remember that.
I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn’t what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.
The prime communities of the Southwest are survival communities. Their sustenance is governed by rainfall and wind direction. You can study little enclaves of plant materials, how they huddle together for protection. Some are nurse crops.
As an African, there are certain professions your family want you to do or are willing to sign off. Being in the medical professional, as a doctor, pharmacist, a nurse, or being an engineer – those are the only professions allowed!
The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn’t have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I’m not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way.
I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.
My father was an ironworker who eventually co-founded a construction business. My mother, Jeanette, was a stay-at-home mom who had been an operating-room nurse until my older brother, Jimmy, was born.
What I love about this job is it’s literally a different day every single day, isn’t it? One day you’re a nurse, the next day you’re in a band – you can just make it up. I’m just a big kid, and that’s really what this job is – just playing dress-up every day.
I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know – what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.
Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.
Dad was a draughtsman; he’s now retired. Mum was a nurse who spent a lot of her time in ER and oncology. She’s such a compassionate, generous person. If I was meeting her on the worst day of my life, I’d be very grateful to have met her.
My upbringing was very basic working-class on the outskirts of Nottingham. My mother, Glenis, was a nursery nurse, looking after special-needs children, and my father, Brian, became the manager of a lace factory after working his way up as an apprentice.
I used to want to be a nurse. But then my sister cut herself really badly and I almost fainted.
I was a nurse.
My dad was enlisted in the Navy; my mother was a nurse. It just was never a thought process. It was just go to the best school you can go to, do the best you possibly can do, and be the best person you can possibly be, and I think our faith had a lot to do with that.
I just fooled around in front of the camera and earned money for it. Every policeman, every soldier, every nurse – they all do more for society. I just rent my face.
We were surrounded by influences and interests that came between Stephen and me. The nurse who became his wife was seeking to undermine me, and there were wider influences, too, following the runaway success of ‘A Brief History of Time.’
There was one point where my mother was dying of lung cancer, and a journalist dressed up as a nurse and got in the house to get a picture of her, dying of lung cancer and stuff like that, and then you realise the fame’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Both of my parents had a change of career. My mum was a nurse, and now she’s a college lecturer.
I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.
At first, I was called a quack, a charlatan, and worse, year after year, in Australia, England and the United States, by men who simply refused to believe that a nurse from ‘the bush’ could devise a treatment which succeeded where they had failed.
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