College Days

COLLEGE (1977-1979) 

I was now a Golden Eagle at the College of Southern Idaho. I had the opportunity to go to any college in the state of Idaho with my scholarship, but decided to stay home and go to the college where my dad worked as Vice-President. I really wanted to be a teacher since education is my love, but I decided to be practical. I had a feeling that I would marry Roger after he got home and knew it might be difficult to finish four years of college under those circumstances. I also knew that it was important in my family to get a degree. So after ponder, prayer and reasoning, I decided to apply for the Registered Nursing program at CSI. It was a two year program that would give me a degree and the graduates took the same boards or tests as the four year RN graduates. The Bachelor degree grads just had more general classes which I would have loved to take, but it worked out well.

I began over the summer right after high school graduation at only 17 years old taking prerequisites needed for the program. I would ride my bike to college down Falls Avenue East probably about 3 miles each way. My fingernails had grown so long I had to hold my pencil differently to write. Someone mentioned I must not do much manual labor…my nails had to be cut before officially starting the RN program that fall. I remember the first day of orientation when the teachers went through our syllabus thinking there was no way humanly possible with only 24 hours in a day to accomplish all the reading assignments and videos they recommended we read and watch. I felt like crying, but decided I would do what I could and have to call it good. Not my perfectionist style, but I had no other choice. The sciences were not my strength. I persevered. I CLEP tested out of some of my English and other basic level courses and jumped right into Anatomy and Physiology and all the core nursing classes. 

My first Clinical experience was at the care center in Jerome, Idaho. In one of the first rooms I entered there was an elderly woman buck-naked except for a pair of high heels she was trotting around the room in. To my surprise the nurse training me did not seem to notice the nakedness, but only chastised that she had told the patient not to wear high heels! It was a welcome to my new world of not-normal. One of the hardest patients I had to deal with was a young man my brother’s age in the Burley Hospital whose leg had been pulled off my the bumper of his parent’s car while he was riding his motorcycle down the country lane to their home. Emotions welled up in me and I had to leave the room and cry. My care plan case study I did was on an older gentleman with pancreatic cancer. He and all 5 of his brothers were lawyers. He was such a nice, elegant man. I learned that pancreatic cancer is not usually diagnosed until it has spread to other parts of the body and was very hard to cure. He was in stage four and probably had about 6 months or less to live. Every day was an adventure and new learning experience. I only fell asleep once driving the early morning roads to clinicals and I grew up quickly with all of the real-life world I was exposed to.

I attended the LDS Institute in a little brick building kitty-corner to the southwest corner of the campus and took classes and went to church there. We had “Friday Forums” with lunch and speakers each week and even had a retreat at a snowy Red Fish Lake in October for leadership training. I was called to be an officer in the presidency there. I loved the Institute. I represented the LDS Institute in the combined groups of college organizations to plan activities for the college. We decided to have a Homecoming weekend during the basketball season and I was nominated to represent the LDSSA as their Homecoming Queen candidate…again. Surprisingly I finally won Homecoming Queen on the fourth attempt, but it was not a huge competition. Glad to be done with that chapter of my life.  

Since I enjoyed sports, I attended all of the basketball games and even some of the baseball games. CSI did not have football and I was not into rodeo though their team won nationals. Over spring break three girls from the college and myself took a road trip to Arizona for a baseball tournament and vacation to a warmer place. We stayed in various interesting places on the journey, I even asked one college in Mesa if we could sleep in a dorm on campus, but most nights we shared an old motel room. I had promised my parents we would not sleep in rest stops for safety. We had planned to make it to Mexico, but did not get there. It was too dark to really see the Grand Canyon very well when we pulled in, but we did swing through Las Vegas and it was a big adventure for an 18 year old girl to journey that far on her own. The baseball couch invited us to have one meal with the team, but I lost weight on that week long trip with very few meals. 

There was drama when a former missionary from Roger’s mission came to his brother’s house in Twin Falls when he was released from his mission and befriended me. He had seen pictures of me on the mission and asked me if I wanted to see pictures of Roger from the mission. I readily agreed and we met. I saw far more pictures of him than of Roger and he asked me to go dancing. Then asked me to accompany him to an old girl friend’s wedding reception in Utah. We only hung out for a few months at most, but he actually asked me to marry him. I told him I needed to wait for Roger to get home which was only a few months away to see how I felt about Roger (since I was still sort of waiting for him even though Dear Jane-d). Needless to say this did not go over well with Roger. I can see things so much clearer looking back and may have made different decisions, but at the time did the best I could. I was a decent person and tried to please too many people I suppose. 

Roger and I got married during the second year of college, but more about that in the next section. He returned from his mission the summer between the two years of the nursing program, we were married in November and by January I was expecting a baby so it made clinical shifts a little more difficult. I remember working in the NICU (Newborn Intensive Care Unit) with babies and being nauseous. Also studying all that could go wrong with pregnancies and fetuses made me think it would be a miracle if everything went okay. Roger would say… “millions have gone before and millions will come after”, but somehow that was not too comforting. 

When I walked across the graduation stage to receive my diploma the College President, Dr. Taylor, said "even though there are two of you walking across this stage the diploma is just for one of you" :-). We had a separate Nursing Graduation and I received the award for graduating academically #1 in my class shockingly. I took my state boards in Boise that summer six months pregnant with my baby kicking me regularly through out the two days of tests and it was actually comforting.

I could write much more, but truly don’t want to bore my posterity with details, instead hopefully give them a feeling of who I was and what I did even though you may have never known me. I have read that people are forgotten by the fourth generation. Maybe at least a few will know who I am and that I hope to meet you one day. I was very imperfect, but tried to love and lift as I sojourned here. 

Nursing School Graduation with Roger (#1 in my class)

CSI graduation with my dad May 1979