THE TEST

She stood outside the office building, trying to light her one cigarette of the day. She used to smoke a pack a day, but for the past three years she has been cutting down. "Almost there!" she said.

She was nervous, anxious and near tears. She said that she had just come out of her nursing exam and she wasn't sure that she passed. For three years she had read and studied hard and prepared for this day. The hours-long test was over, and in a few days she would know her fate. She would not be able to sleep until then.

So here she stood, trembling a bit but trying to hide it from the others trickling out the door and heading to their cars. She had been so nervous on this day that she asked a friend to drive her to the test site. Now, she waited for her ride to take her back the nearly one hundred miles to the small town where she lived and had studied and crammed for months and months.

She said that she's wanted to be a nurse for years. She couldn't recall when she decided that. She likes helping people, she said. It gives her great satisfaction to help ease another person's discomfort or pain. There's nothing like it, she smiled.

She worries most about the medications part of the rest. See, all candidates must answer at least 75 questions. The student can opt for more, up to two hundred and something, she said. The test-givers randomly assign a few in the class to submit to the whole test. She had opted for the whole battery, and she believes that she did okay except for the very last question. Now she worries. Maybe her whole future in medicine lies in that one, lousy test answer written on a piece of paper in a large room in a tall building in a big city.

She is among hundreds of thousands of nursing students attempting to enter a profession that is begging for qualified practitioners. This woman -- a single mother of three -- may someday tend to your mother or father, or maybe even to you, or your spouse.

If she passes today's exam.

Wish her well. Tell her will that it is an important calling that she has answered. Ask any doctor: a good RN is worth his or her weight in gold.

We need everyone to be really good at what he or she does, actually. We are Americans, after all.

We are family.

We are the American family.