Theresa Turner:  

Ok, here we go; after many years at ECHS, actually graduated from Waterford Township HS and went on to UofM in Ann Arbor to pursue my BSN. My first year at Michigan- wasn't sure I was going to stick to nursing, so took a language, Latin; had it in my senior year and obviously it was still fresh in my mind when I took the placement test and I placed into 3rd year Latin; what a struggle; we translated the Aeneid- got thru it by the skin of my teeth. During summers and in the school year worked at the hospital and graduated in 1972 and started work full time at the hospital after a brief month long trip to Europe with a college roomate. In '75 started grad school and decided that if I didn't want to go to school forever, I needed to go to school full time and work part time instead of the other way around. Also looked around and saw colleagues who had been working at U Hospital for 30 years and that wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing, but I knew I wanted something different. So after graduating with an MS in Health Services Administration I took a trip to the Middle East- no flying carpets nor genies in bottles, but some of the other standard beliefs are probably true. I went with the understanding of staying for a minimum of 3-6mos and ended up being there nearly a decade. When I went, our University Hospital in Riyadh (the King Kahlid Univ Hospital; they have a habit in Saudi Arabia of naming Kings after the hospitals and airports-ha), had 35 beds open and when I left in 1989, we had 635 beds open and were doing open heart and kidney transplants. I was Director of Nursing and we had 32 different nationalities in the Nursing Department alone. Needless to say this experience was profound for me and gave me a new appreciation of the role of culture in our world. I became very aware of how xenophobic we often are as we sit in our Western comfort. I worked very hard, but also was able to have wonderful holidays and travel to some very exotic places. I had been privileged in grad school to be able to travel to the People's Republic of China in 1981 long before a lot of Western visitors and had the chance to return 2 other times while in the Middle East. I was able to return to the US at least once a year and was home in 1986 for my mother's final days before she succumbed to cancer that had been first diagnosed in 1973. My father remarried ( a bit too soon for my brothers' and my liking) but he died in 1992 of a massive stroke; he had experienced some rapid progression of dementia prior to his death. I had returned to the US to spend some time with my dad and at first took a sabbatical from work and then started working part time and also returned to the Middle East, this time to East Jerusalem to teach a management course to Palestinian middl...Expand for more