I’ve endured many losses in my life, but the most intense and traumatic experience I have encountered was the loss of my vision in one eye, at the age of thirty-three, due to Glaucoma. Human beings make mistakes, you can count on it, but each of us must learn to overcome anger and resentment when someone has done us wrong. I was misdiagnosed with Glaucoma and lost my sight in one eye during a hike in Colorado.

Once I’d realized a physician was to blame for my loss, I pursued a malpractice law suit against them. After painful surgery on my eye, an injection in my eye due to infection, dodging a PI who followed me for an insurance company, and two years of bickering between attorneys, I settled for less than what I could have sold an eye for on Ebay. At the time, I was planning to return to school and get my second Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing. Instead, I chose to take some time off and backpack through Southeast Asia and see the Far East with the one eye I had left with the hope of not losing it. After losing and finding myself in Asia, I returned to Florida and completed my nursing degree and never gave up on my dream to help sick children.

After working with critically ill children in the ICU, I entered Nurse Anesthesia School with hopes of providing anesthesia to children during their surgery. After a year of reading thousands of pages of text and placing thirty airways in adult patients for their surgery, my other eye said “enough” and one afternoon in the operating room I began to lose my vision in my one eye due to the glaucoma, the stress of reading too many anesthesia books, and the long hours in the operating room. When I became aware of my deteriorating vision in the only eye I had left and the risk of harming the patient I was to put to sleep for their surgery, I quit!!!

When I saw my Ophthalmologist and a retina specialist the next day, they warned me that I had damaged my one eye from the stress of the rigorous program and advised me to stop reading and withdraw from school. I informed the school’s director that I was withdrawing from their anesthesia program with only one third of it completed.

So there I was, out of my anesthesia program I had devoted my heart and soul to, unemployed, and stuck with a student loan the size of three brand new cars…Rock bottom is a low and lonely place to be. After sitting in the corner like little Jack Horner and pouting for hours on end, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and returned to work as a recovery room nurse, never telling a soul about my miserable situation.

After two years of working as a traveling nurse, I have now published two children’s books, am happily married to my wife Annie, who is also a traveling nurse, and live life one day at a time gazing at our world with hope and amazement for the future. Always remember there is only one way to go from rock bottom and that is up…

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