And so I've joined the blogging world

Hi, I hope you enjoy reading my blog. I’ll be using it mostly for health and safety issues that have come up in the news. I’ll write a bit about myself and how I took the path to being a freelance writer, and how being a nurse made it all happen.

I have three children, two teens and one is 20 years old. All their lives, I’ve been telling them that what they decide to study, the path they choose to follow, does not mean that they’ll be doing that for the rest of their life.

So much pressure is placed on our kids today. They have to do well in school – of course as parents, we want that – but they also are supposed to decide at an early age what it is they want to do with their lives, for the rest of their lives.

Our world has changed so much that it’s not so easy to decide at 18 what you want to do for the next 40 plus years. There are jobs now that didn’t exist when we were in high school, and jobs that exist now may not exist 20 years from now.

I began studying nursing when I was 17 years old. I have always loved to write and I was good at it too. But, writing wasn’t considered a path to follow unless you wanted to be a journalist or something like that. So, after pondering my choices, I chose nursing. I chose it because I knew that I would always be able to find some sort of work, anywhere. So, that’s what I did.

I studied, graduated, worked, got married, had kids, but I always had this creativity in me that wasn’t coming out. When my youngest was a preschooler, I found a tiny ad in the Montreal Gazette. It said that they were searching for a nurse with Internet experience and who was a good communicator. Sounded like the perfect job for me. And it was. I began working, from home, for a health Internet site that no longer exists. For almost two years, I worked remotely and did some writing as part of my work. After I left that job, I ended up working for another medical website for several years. I freelanced on the side, my favourite work was writing patient education stuff.

In the meantime, I was still keeping my hand in nursing, but my passion was writing. Finally, last October, I took the plunge and began freelancing full-time. I now write and edit medical and health information and I love it. If I hadn’t studied nursing all those years ago, I would not be doing what I’m doing now.

I would like to spread out, write about other things as well. But, at least with my medical writing, I get to do what it is I really like to do. I got to be home with my kids as they grew up, I got to work full-time, and I got to be part of the new frontier, the Internet.

So, that’s who I am and how I became to be a health writer. I hope you’ll come back and visit; I think this will be fun.