I love life. At 9 years old in “The World Book Encyclopedia”, I read that I would not live to become a teenager. I had looked up what I had been diagnosed with: Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). My mom laughed as I cried while sharing the news with her. “You can’t believe everything you read”, is what she told me. You see my sister with the same diagnosis was approaching adulthood at 18 years old.

From then on I did my best to live my life by what God says not what man says. I have outgrown my adolescence and am now in my senior years. Those 62 years have been filled with many miraculous situations, all of which I was told couldn’t happen. I was a premed student, I have had psychotic breaks as a reaction to anesthesia and gained back my right mind. I became a Registered Nurse, got married, had 3 children when I was told many times I couldn’t have any. My hemoglobin was too low to sustain life and I cot the child would die. That nearly happened with my first pregnancy, I was told to abort my child while almost 3 months pregnant. I had a bad SCD crisis and as a reaction to a blood transfusion had a hemolytic crisis which caused my hemoglobin level to drop to 2 and I wasn’t able to sustain my oxygen level above 85% while wearing oxygen. I held strong to my faith and my son is a healthy 30 year old that works in construction. By this time I developed many rare antibodies in my blood and I have gotten transfusions from Canada, England, and Paris. I like to say that I have international blood. Although my marriage ended in divorce, we coparented well, even with my son from another relationship. I maintained my work as a pediatric nurse for over 30 years. I’ve also been a Sunday School Teacher, a Girl Scout Leader, a Licensed Financial Educator, and am becoming a certified yoga instructor. I enjoy learning, reading, writing and teaching what I learned. Crochet is a study hobby.
All of this has been done between multiple hospitalizations. I have had trying times but remain persistence personified, keeping the faith.