From Happy Hour to Nursing School ~ A Beverly Suzanne Price Story
I was living with my parents, with my son (my only child), because I was so poor that I had no money for rent, although I always worked from the age of 12 on, but my first marriage left me destitute. I was taking banking classes at night because I wanted to go into that field. I was on my way one afternoon in early August 1979 to meet a girlfriend, one who had moved to a much larger city an hour away, to join her for Happy Hour (mind you, we were in our twenties and neither of us hardly drank at all, but a good glass of wine every month or so together was nice).
I made a wrong turn into a one-way street and wound up pulling into a parking lot to get away from the traffic, which had been honking at me. I looked directly across from the parking lot and saw that I was parked in front of a Nursing School. Since it was too early to meet up with my friend, and because I needed to take a break from driving for a few minutes, I went into the Nursing School and simply asked some questions.
To be honest, I had no interest in Nursing but had another acquaintance who did want to be a nurse, so I thought I would pick up a brochure for her. I figured they wouldn't give me a brochure for someone else, so I feigned that I was interested in nursing. One thing led to another, and they talked me into taking an "aptitude" test that was two weeks away. That appealed to me, so I signed up for it, although the test cost $70.00 - a lot of money back then when you were only making $1.60 an hour - as I thought it might reveal to me whether banking or accounting were careers I should pursue. They mentioned that I had to have my transcripts from High School sent to them before the test, which I thought was weird, but, oh well, I could do that. I then met my friend and forgot about the transcripts until the next week.
I was able to make contact to get my Junior and Senior High School transcripts from Missouri sent to the Nursing School, but during my freshman and sophomore years our family lived in Washington state. I finally got the number from a telephone operator to call the school in Washington. A woman answered the phone and told me she would get the transcripts in the mail that day. Just before she hung up, she asked me, "How did you know to call during this time?" I was totally surprised by her question and asked her why she was asking me this. She replied that during the three-month period from the end of May until the first week in September, no one was in the office at the school during that time, and she just happened to drop by and thought she would sort through the mail since she had a couple of hours before she was to meet her husband. She said, "There is only this two-hour window all summer, when I stopped in today, that anyone was here to answer the phone. Otherwise you would have had to wait another month to get the transcripts mailed." WOW!!
Well, I still didn't realize that maybe the Lord might have His hand in this, so I just went along my way and took the "aptitude" test the week after that, not realizing at all that it was a pre-entrance exam. Even after taking the aptitude test (which I thought was really strange and couldn't see how a person's aptitude could be determined by this series of tests that lasted over five hours) that it was a pre-entrance exam. Imagine my surprise when I got a letter from the nursing school a few days later which stated, "Congratulations, Beverly. You have been accepted to our nursing school. Only four of the 108 people taking the exam were approved and accepted to our nursing classes, and you are one of them. Classes start in two weeks." Wow again, I was blown away. I didn't even want to be a nurse, but it hit me that none of this had been a coincidence, and it must be the path that the Lord was setting me on.
I remembered a scripture verse right away in Proverbs.
Proverbs 16:9: "A man's mind plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps and makes them sure" (AMP).
I graduated as an RN on my 30th birthday - now how ironic is that! I immediately went to work full-time as an RN at a major medical center, while taking college classes on a part-time basis, and eventually earned a Master's Degree, which catapulted my career over the years from staff nursing roles into nursing leadership.
I started out working on a Med-Surg RN on night shift, then worked in various RN positions over the next four decades after transitioning to day-shift after the first year, which included working in the CCU (Cornonary Care Unit), ICU (Intensive Care Unit), Cardiac Cath Lab, Cardiac Rehab, served as a Code Blue Team Leader for trauma and medical emergenies at a Level 1 Trauma Center, taught RN classes for interpretation of 12-lead EKGs and other cardiac issues, and just to expand my understanding of the nursing field worked part-time in other facilities in psychiatric units from children's psych, adolescent psych, adult psych, and geriatric psych.
Because of my wide range of nursing experience, I eventually was able to serve in Senior Nursing Leadership positions. I worked in numerous facilities and in different states, serving as a Chief Nursing Officer at the time of my retirement. Even more ironic is that I served in the senior nursing leadership positions for exactly 24 years to the day, although I did not purposefully plan it that way, and it was only after I retired and wrote the date down in my personal nursing ledger that I realized that. Since 24 represents completion (e.g., 24 hours in a day, etc.), I felt that the Lord had directed it that way, just as He had directed every aspect of my career and opened up each path that I wound up on.
Beverly
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