by Marijo Phelps

Created on: December 16, 2010   Last Updated: December 25, 2010

Could I say that life was good? It should have been. I really did enjoy working as an RN after several times of changing majors in college, I finally found a  “fit." I loved biology, science and people. 

I remember when I was five, my sister was in the hospital for a prolonged period of time. She had polio before the vaccine and before the big epidemic of 1952 and no one was sure how to treat her disease. We went to visit and she was sobbing. It Seemed no one answered her call light and she wet her bed, she was told if she didn’t stop crying her mom and dad would never come to see her again. As she sobbed out her trauma to us, it became permanently etched in my heart and mind. This was the main reason I finally ended up in my chosen career of nursing. I remembered and wanted to make a difference for my pediatric patients, one that my sister hadn’t been fortunate enough to have with her nurse.

I was married to a guy I thought the world of, but we partied too much. We drank each and every day. When we tried to quit for a week, we only made it a day and a half. We drank wine coolers, booze in the blender with ice cream and called it desert. We mixed drinks with loud music and had friends who did the same. I was a mean drinker and would zero in to slice up “friends” with my tongue. The next morning I always felt terrible about what I had said the night before.

Tom and I had lived together 2 years before getting married and had been pretty heavily into smoking marijuana too, but had quit that when he decided to go back to school. He noticed that friends who were doing any kind of drugs lacked serious motivation in college. He maintained a straight A average. I was a professing atheist. In retrospect I was professing “there is NO God” a bit too loudly.

Our marriage was stressed with me working 6 days a week to put him through school. All the drinking we were doing and the fact I became a “mean” drunk added to the stress. One of the gals I worked with was a born again Christian. She knew not to talk to me about "her Jesus," but would tell me about her friends at church and what they did. It was evident from her smile and care for her patients that she knew how to love. She patiently listened to me telling her how I thought that smarter beings from other planets came here and did things on earth with and for the people who lived here. They taught us etc. She would always

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