I knew I was in for a career change several years ago when I worked as a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit of a large metropolitan hospital, and admitted a young man with a golf club embedded in his skull. Not to be confused with the patient who'd been shot through the eye with an arrow, or the one who'd been crushed in an industrial-sized trash compactor, we stabilized Golf-Club Man enough to turn him over to the neurosurgeons in the Operating Room.

I loved my job. It was full of challenges, frequent adrenaline rushes and great camaraderie, and I never thought of doing anything else until I went back to school to study history. It was a great escape, learning about the past, and when I studied the Medieval period, it seemed just as strange as some of the things I saw every day in the ICU.