prompts for july 2026

Do you have a work wife/husband? If so, describe them. If you’re retired, do you still keep in touch with your former colleagues?

When I was working in a long-term care facility years ago, I was pretty close with some of my coworkers. You get to know someone really well when you spend 12 hours in a tiny little medication room preparing meds, snacking, gossiping, planning.

The med room is so small that if each nurse took a step backward from their respective med carts, their butts would nearly touch. Add nursing students in there too, who are training, and it’s a disaster area.

Inside the med room there are two nurses on a day shift and each with one med cart, which becomes the thing you lean on when your legs are getting tired, where you sometimes eat your lunch off of when time permits you to only eat on the fly, and of course where you prepare meds from.

In that med room is where I called my kids 600 times a morning to ensure they were up for school, while my coworker looked on smiling but was probably actually annoyed.

It was where I received the phone call from Mom saying Dad had been having chest pain and though she’d convinced him to go to Emerg more than once, each time he left AMA (against medical advice) and she was at her wit’s end with him so I called and spoke to him and basically gave him shit and said you are not smarter than the doctors! I was more than grateful to have my coworker Bincy, to debrief with after that.

My co-nurses and I shared so many personal stories in that med room. Fights with spouses over forgotten anniversaries, triumphs over potty-training, personal health scares, worries about money, worries about family…you name it.

I’m still in touch with most of them although we’ve gone our separate ways.

I think there’s a quote that goes something like ‘I didn’t know it then, but those were the good old days’.