18 Signs You're Being Raised by a Nurse

Plenty of families have a nurse in them, and the kids grow up a little differently for it. If there's a nurse in your house, you'll recognize most of these. And if you're a nurse without kids yet, consider it a preview.

1. Role playing was your favorite childhood game. You played doctor or nurse because you wanted to be one. Your patients were teddy bears, dolls, or a younger sibling, and your kit had a real stethoscope and sphygmomanometer.

2. You have to be bleeding out or barely conscious to get rushed to the ED. A fever that would send other parents running gets a tepid sponge bath first. You see a doctor only after the clinical eye at home decides something is genuinely wrong. And when you do get sick, every past medication is on a list, and half of them are already in the purse.

3. You know the right words. You didn't have a tummyache, you had diarrhea. The pain wasn't on your "side," it was the right upper quadrant. A headache was a migraine, and being hungry and shaky was hypoglycemia. You picked it all up just from listening at home.

4. You keep your distance when they get home from work. No hugs until after a shower. They've been in contact with who-knows-what all day, and they'll remind you of it before you get close.

5. Your school projects came stocked with medical supplies. While other kids used regular tape, you had cloth and paper medical tapes, gauze, cotton balls, tongue depressors, and bandage scissors for the cutting.

6. You're used to strange hours and working through anything. Hectic schedules mean birthdays and anniversaries sometimes get missed or shuffled. Storms and hurricanes don't cancel a shift; that's when nurses are needed most. Somehow they still find a way to show up for what matters.

7. Your stuff gets replaced by hospital gear. Missing kitchen scissors? Check for bandage scissors. No tape for a project? Here's surgical tape. Nurses are relentlessly resourceful with whatever came home in a pocket.

8. You have an endless supply of alcohol pads. They're everywhere. You use them to clean jewelry, wipe your phone, whatever. They never run out.

9. You don't gross out easily. After years of dinner-table stories about a sewn-up neck laceration or a patient with copremesis, your stomach can take almost anything.

10. The nurse at home has medical advice for everyone. Relatives, neighbors, strangers, any question from health to sex to the truly weird. The answers come from practice, not just a textbook.

11. You learned to wash your hands properly. Handwashing is the single most effective way to stop the spread of infection, so you were taught to do it right and reminded constantly. Travel far from home and a hand sanitizer appears the second you put your hand out.

12. You can't fake a symptom. Every attempt to act sick and skip school failed. Nurses have seen the real thing too many times to be fooled.

13. You knew where babies come from early. No awkward birds-and-bees talk needed. You had ovulation, fertilization, and labor down, and you knew the reproductive system ran the whole show.

14. You knew the colleagues by their initials. You can tell an LPN from an M.D., BSN, RN, MSN, or DNP.

15. Their pockets are treasure chests. Tape, alcohol swabs, pens, and if you were lucky, candy.

16. Medical dramas are ruined for you. Hard to enjoy the show with someone narrating everything it gets wrong.

17. You get the fascination with good veins. You understand the lean-in to study the forearm of the cashier handing over your change, or the comment at the movies: "He has beautiful veins, I could land a 14-gauge in that." Prominent veins are their kind of art.

18. When you do get sick, you're in the best hands there are. They know your body, they know the medicine, and they'll care for you around the clock. That's the real upside of living with a nurse.