When I decided to pursue nursing, I was a full-time opera singer at a theater in Bielefeld, Germany. Five years prior to this decision, I had helped care for a friend named Ron, who died of cancer, during the last 6 months of his life. Besides the fact that he was a young 31 year-old and diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, there were two things that really caught my attention: 1) the way the hospital staff interacted with him and his family; 2) the great amount of caregiver strain that his mother faced.