As I have written about in the past, DOUA, the Disabled Online Users Association, has made a huge contribution to my life. They helped me to gain confidence in myself when I could no longer work due to being very sick.

Now DOUA needs my help and yours too. CommuniCause is hosting a contest to give non-profits a $25,000 Social Media Makeover. You can vote two ways:

1. Go to the website. Find Disabled Online Users Association by clicking on Top Tens and if not there click on “Try Looking Here” (charities are listed in alpahabetical order). Then click on Vote. You will need to give your email address and can only vote once per email address.
2. Use Twitter. Here’s an example of what to tweet (please note that you need to include these three pieces of info in your tweet: “@communicause” and  “http://communicause.com” and “#cause1431″)

PL RT: Help DOUA, non-profit for ppl w/ disabilities raise money for Social Media Makeover @communicause http://communicause.com #cause1431

Thank You For Your Votes So Far:

- GinaLaGuardia
- Bonnie Sayers
- Lisa
- Macy
- Mama Bok
- Alex
- Moomettesgram
- HeatherinBC
- Joyntheir
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Since I have multiple chronic illnesses, I use the internet quite often to get information on health issues. This is not only for myself but for this blog so that I can help educate others on treatments, research and any health related news.

Scrubs is an online magazine for Nurses, but has many interesting articles for anyone interested in health, medical issues and patient care. The magazine is focused toward all stages of nursing, i.e. student nurses, novice nurses and experienced nurses. The posts also provide information on current events, like the Swine Flu, health issues, like weight loss, fashion, like beauty tips and news and entertainment, like movies and books.

The article, The Cafeteria Eater’s Guide, under the category Health and then Nutrition, gave me some tips on eating healthy when eating out when you’re in a rush. Some of the tips are: drinking water instead of soda, eating a real salad made up of a lot of vegetables and not much lettuce, with dressing on the side, and not getting a large order of anything unless it’s vegetables.

I especially enjoyed the article, Would You Accept an RN on a Scooter?, which described a nurse who began a non-profit agency to help other nurses with disabilities either return to nursing or find ways to continue nursing. Since I am a disability advocate, this post was my favorite.

If you take immunosuppressant drugs or are immune compromised due to chronic illness or cancer, should you be concerned about the Swine Flu? If you live in the US, right now the answer seems to be no. This flu is hitting healthy people. It is hitting people who have visited Mexico or have had contact with someone who were in Mexico recently. (This may change quickly though.)

Stay informed with the CDC Swine Flu website. The What’s New section is updated minute by minute. You can also follow CDCemergency on Twitter for instant updates.

Now, we know to take precautions all the time any way. We use good hand washing, avoid people who are sick and avoid large crowds. I am not ashamed to move away from someone who is coughing or sneezing. If it’s someone I know, I explain myself. If it’s a stranger, I may just move away quietly or I may say something like, “I’m coming down with something so I need to be careful.” Do what feels comfortable for you. If you think that you need to wear a protective mask, do so. If you feel like you’re not well and need to stay home, stay home. No need to stress over this.

DOUA, The Disabled Online Users Association, now has a brand new area on their training center to help you learn how to blog. Membership to DOUA is free and open to anyone with any type of disability from MS to Fibromyagia, from Raynaud’s Syndrome to Bipolar Disease, any type of physical or mental impairment.

You just fill out an online form, get approved and gain access to the Training Center. Inside you can learn about earning money online. This organization mainly teaches about selling on eBay, but has opened up to starting your own website, selling on Etsy, Amazon and blogging. There is information on all types of ways to make money. DOUA is also a support group where members get to know and trust each other. I’ve been a member and a mentor there for years.

Take advantage of this offer and learn how to blog for free.

As much as I love blogging, it can really do a number on my hands due to having Rhuematoid Arthritis. Typing, even using a good keyboard and padding for my wrists can hurt after just a short while. It also makes me type slower as I take breaks to rest my hands. There is a software program that can help with this and it is very easy to use.

What an opportunity for anyone who wants to speed up their blogging which enables you to earn more money! Nuance is allowing us to offer our readers a 25% Discount Coupon CODE Exclusive for Dragon Naturally Speaking, but you must click the image below and use this code (DNSMSBG) Together. Code will not work from other sources.

25% off Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard

Here is some hard data proving that the use of this software is worthwhile:

This is an excerpt from a white paper discussing how bloggers can earn more money through several different monetization and freelance writing services. It shows that bloggers that utilize Dragon Naturally Speaking can earn more money through these various services and how fast these extra earnings will pay for the software itself.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Blogger Break Even Analysis with Average PayPerPost Earnings

Basically, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can help you type so much faster, that you can earn a lot more money per hour.
In this article I’m going to walk you through another scenario focusing on how much extra you could earn if you wrote for PayPerPost.com and you had a single average blog. Now at PayPerPost.com, the amount of money that you earn for your writing is not paid on a per word basis.
PayPerPost.com offers up opportunities, they call them opportunities, but you can also think of them as piecework or a job, and these “opportunities” typically have a minimum word count. The minimum word count is typically 200 words for your average article. In general the average article at PayPerPost on a high earning blog pays about $8.3. Sometimes they pay a little less, and sometimes they pay a little bit more, and a few go to extremes on the positive side.
Now if you are paid $8.3 to write a 200 word article, then that breaks down to about 4.2 cents per word. That is about 6 times more than what you can make at textbroker.com. I mentioned that only for comparison purposes, because PayPerPost.com limits you to writing three articles per blog per day.
That means that you cannot write at PayPerPost all day long for your single blog. (If you have additional blogs, you might be able to write additional articles on those other blogs.)
Tip! – You can write your three articles at PayPerPost, write some additional articles without any sponsors in between those articles (as is required), and then write some articles at PayU2Blog, and when the work is exhausted there, you can write some articles at TextBroker.com! The trick is working for the company that pays you the most first, then moving on to the next highest margin provider, over and over again.
You will see in the case studies with Adsense that writing MORE articles is actually good for building traffic to your blog!
But if we assume, just to have a comparison to our textbroker.com example, if we assume that you could type articles at PayPerPost for fifty minutes straight, earning 4.2 cents per word, and you could type 35 words per minute, you could earn $72.88 dollars per hour at PayPerPost. Now obviously, you cannot take 9 articles on a single blog in a single day, but this does point to the rate at which you can earn things with the work that is available. That $72.88 would be the earnings you could make from about 8.8 Opportunities at $8.3 per Opportunity.
So bear with me again with this example.
So what can faster typing skills do to help you earn more money at PayPerPost?
Well if you could type at 150 words per minute with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and you currently type at 35 words per minute, then you could earn about $239 per hour more! (Dragon only costs between $99 and $199 remember!)
Reminder - This would assume that you could type articles nonstop at a hundred and fifty words per minute for fifty minutes. For most of us, that doesn’t mean a whole lot.
But to put this in better perspective, if you earned $72.88 from writing about nine articles, and those articles were each 200 words long, then you would have written a total of 1800 words.
• 1800 words can be typed and 50 minutes at 35 words per minute
• 1800 words can be typed in 12 minutes at 150 words per minute
Dragon NaturallySpeaking can essentially save you 38 minutes when you write nine articles.
Now with those additional thirty-eight minutes, you can spend more time:
• promoting your blog,
• networking with people,
• researching other projects,
• taking on other work from other networks
• build up a new blog to command $8.3 per article!
• Go write some articles for PayU2Blog
• Go write some articles for TextBroker
• Go write some articles to bring in more traffic and earn more money through Adsense!
You can pocket your $72.88 from twelve minutes worth of work. You can then spend the rest of that hour, working to ensure that the blog you publish those on performs very well. But the point is this, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can save you so much time, that it will pay for itself very quickly.
Your average part-time blogger will easily pay for Dragon NaturallySpeaking with the additional profits that they would earn from using Dragon NaturallySpeaking in less than 1 hour worth of blogging through PayPerPost alone.
Plus just think of all of the time, that you would now have to make yourself and your site even more successful!

The full white paper article is available at this site.

I often feel like I could be a doctor knowing so much medical information about myself, being able to research about diseases, conditions and medications and even knowing how to read prescriptions. I’ve always wanted to be in the medical field, in fact when I took medical terminology, my instructor who was an RN, pulled me aside and suggested that I go into nursing. But, I can’t stand the sight of blood and get very upset when someone is sick.

Since I’ve become sick I have gotten to know how much work nurses are required to do especially in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. Their responsibilities are increasing but their reimbursement isn’t. If they were able to continue working and go to school to get an MS nursing degree, many would jump at the chance.

St. Xavier’s Online Master’s Degree in Nursing is a viable option. You are required to have a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing, have a current nursing license, pass the GRE, provide recommendations and complete an application. Then you can study online toward a Masters in Science of Nursing - Clinical Nursing Leader (CNL).

St. Xavier is an Regionally Accredited university and is Nationally Recognized University. There are no concerns about your degree being accepted by employers. The degree provided offers many possibilities for employment since you will be learning how to prevent mistakes, save money, keep patient care coordinated with a team approach, all things that are cutting edge.

You choose your own hours for online work as long as you keep to the schedule and only meet one weekend on campus. You are able to access you work online at any time, “meet” your fellow students and professors online in virtual classrooms and get assistance as needed every day at all hours.

So if you are looking for a promotion for your nursing career but thought it wasn’t possible, take a look at what St. Xavier has to offer you.