This month, we should have been packing for our national conference. Faculty colleagues should have been feeling proud and satisfied after attending student commencements, and clinical colleagues should have been looking forward to a well-deserved summer vacation after a fulfilling spring of productive work in their specialty area. None of us expected an alternate version of reality.

Instead, our colleagues who are clinicians were either being pushed to their limits with critically ill patients or experiencing the shock of being seemingly unneeded because all health care resources were turned toward treating those with novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections and essentially nothing else. Our faculty colleagues were asked to immediately transform their entire semester plans to create a fully online learning environment, as well as manage the disappearance of student clinical courses that were too dangerous to carry out. No one has had time to take a breath, and it is not over yet.

Nurse practitioners have been far too busy with their patients, their students, and the wealth of new information related to COVID epidemiology and treatment to see what an impact they are having and what an impression they are creating as clinicians and leaders. The remarkable contributions of our colleagues will be remembered. That will surely be a silver lining in the pandemic cloud.

James Baldwin famously said, "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." I know many of us have felt trapped in this history in the making. Please, everyone, write about your experiences while they are fresh. Do not let them stay trapped inside you. This is an unprecedented time in history, and you have been an eyewitness. Your contributions, should you choose to express and share them, will be a part of an important historical record for you personally as well as the health care community.

The year of the nurse and midwife

Each month during 2020 this space features important accomplishments by nurses in celebration of our year, as designated by the World Health Organization. I am sure many of you have seen the meme on social media noting that a major pandemic was not how we expected to celebrate the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Nonetheless, that is what we got and we will march on and get it done like we always do.

Speaking of marching, June 4 marks the 101st anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment that guaranteed all women the right to vote. The history of nursing has always been linked to women's history, and even today, we remain a majority female profession, so it is an important event to note. Women had been marching, petitioning, and protesting their lack of a voice in the government of the United States since the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. It took 72 years, longer than the early leaders lived to see, for women in our country to gain voting rights. The amendment was ratified in August of 1920 and women started voting that month (Library of Congress, 2020).

June 28 marks the birth date of nurse Clara Maass, who served during the Spanish American War in Cuba. During the war, more soldiers died of yellow fever than were killed from battle. Efforts were underway to determine the cause of yellow fever. Maass volunteered to be an experimental subject. She was bitten by a mosquito and contracted a very mild form of the illness, from which she quickly recovered. The physicians did not believe that she could have become immunized by such a mild attack, so she agreed to be bitten again. This second case was virulent and she died on August 24, 1901 at the age of 25 (AAHN, 2018).

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