In 2010, after losing everything and living under a bridge, someone became an EMT, then paramedic, then nursing school valedictorian despite dismissing it as a girls' field. They worked hospital weekends while taking classes weekdays, earned an ADN, BSN, and MSN, and got into Arizona State's doctoral program.
Chapters
All my money and all my land went away. And by 2010, I was living under a bridge in a subdivision that I developed and now had a cow pasture on it instead of the golf course that I played. Okay. It took 18 months for a brand new home to be built and sold in the state of Florida. And so I said, well, now what do I do, right? And so somebody said, well, I'll just say the truth, short version of this. And somebody dared me to do something different. And what I did was I went to school and I became an ent, and then I became a paramedic. And then I went and talked to the counselor, and I'm like, paramedic makes the same amount of money as a dude at McDonald's. What do I do? She said, well, you can go be a firefighter or you can go be a garbage man. And I said, well, isn't there something else in. In this field that I just spent nine months or 12 months studying to go and do? And she says, well, there's nursing, but that's for girls. I said, sign me up. She didn't know me right. So I became valedictorian, which was not even possible with the grades I got in high school, but I became valedictorian of my nursing class. I went through paramedic school and nursing school, which is typically not done. And I did that because I was living under a bridge and my student loans were paying for it, and I could. That was all I could really afford to do, was go to school, learn, and work. So I went to school Monday through Friday, Monday through Thursday, and then I worked Friday, Saturday, Sunday at the hospital as a tech. And I learned a lot of really cool stuff. I learned. One thing that I learned was I was adrenaline junkie. I loved adrenaline. And so for the next 10 years after I graduated with my ADN, I got a BSN, then an MSN, and then eventually I did get accepted to Arizona State University and worked on 18 months of my doctorate degree before Covid.
