Recently, I've been doing research on a friends's family. His grandmother Rose was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in her early 40s, around the time when her only child was graduating from high school. The disease went into remission for a short while but by the time Rose was in her late 50s, her husband no longer could provide the specialized care she needed. Rose moved into the local nursing home, where her husband visited her every day.
Whenever her out-of-state grandsons visited, Rose always reminded them that she once was a registered nurse. Clearly, her status as an RN meant a lot to her, especially since the boys only saw her disabled body lying in a hospital bed in a depressing nursing home. Unlike some of her peers, Rose graduated from high school and was accepted as a nursing student at a hospital 30 miles away. It was one of the few careers open to women at the time. The hospital, like many others, expected much of their female students. Besides studying, for three years the nursing students worked at the hospital before graduating. Six months later, the trained nurses had to pass a board-certified examination in order to become a Registered Nurse. Of the 102 nursing students, Rose was one of 33 who received an honor seal on her RN certificate for having an average grade of 90 percent or more in all subjects.
Rose had fallen in love with her future husband long before she became a nurse. I know because I have a box of letters that she she wrote to her hometown beau during the entire time she lived in the hospital students' dormitory 30 miles away. Yet Rose put off marriage and having children to follow her dream of being a nurse. After all, one of the hospital rules (and other institutions like it) was that anyone who marries while in training was expelled from the nursing program. One year after she was officially an RN, Rose married.
