Vacation!!!! Or Not!!!

So for the last two weeks I have been on vacation from the hospital.  (Well actually, I'm pretty sure I'm going to just start calling my vacation time, sick leave, since the last two vacations, I have gotten sick).  It has been nice to catch up on sleep and not really HAVE to do anything.  But I was thinking about it and even though I was not in the hospital...I really didn't stop nursing.  Yes, the technical hands on skills part, but overall I guess it's true when they say: "Once a nurse, always a nurse".  Looking back on the two weeks, I see that most of my everyday activities could be defined or seen as part of nursing, especially since nursing isn't only a profession but really more of a way of life. 
On my days off, it was nothing for me to answer medical questions for family members, friends, and yes even those complete strangers who happened to notice I was a nurse.  (It kills me how often I can be out in public on my days off, and people will ask me "Are you a nurse?"  It especially cracks me up when this question comes when people watch me wash my hands and they say "I can always tell just by how you wash your hands".) 
The things I do everything can often be described as "nurse" things: giving advice to a new mother about nutrition, care seats, and baby behavior, letting others go first in line, actively listening to friends or family members, volunteering my time, and of course just thinking like a nurse, whether hanging with friends or making my bed at home (got to love those sheet corners). 
It is amazing to me how for the first time, I really realized that nursing is not just a 12 hour job, or even a job that can be left at work and not taken with us where ever we go.  Nursing isn't only a job at all, but rather a life time commitment of changing people's attitudes and lives, if only in the little everyday things that we do.  So while I may have gotten a break from the hospital, there was no break from nursing.