A Quote by Carol Guzy

I had gone to nursing school at Northampton Community College in my hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And nursing didn't feel quite right, and an old boyfriend gave me a 35-millimeter camera just to play with. So, I took a darkroom class.
By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.
Theater was always in the backdrop. Nursing was a way to pay the bills. I wasn't a nurse; I had a nursing agency.
I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'
I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her life. She was in a nursing facility in my little hometown area of northern Illinois, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the disease. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a pretty big way.
I didn't think at all about my body until after I stopped nursing. When I was nursing, my body was my daughter's, I didn't even think about it. Then I finished nursing, and I was kind of like "Oh, huh, wow, my body's so different."
I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.
I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person. People's parents die at various ages, but my father died of mortality. He died of being an old person. Illness and stuff happened, but essentially, he was old and he was going to die.
When my mother was young, only two professions were open to women ; teaching and nursing. She chose nursing, but the teaching profession was full of talented women like her, confined there in part because they had few career options.
There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn't mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.
There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn’t mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.
My mother was an administrator at a nursing home, and my first job was working at a nursing home as an activities assistant. She wanted me to do it because it forces you out of your shell, and it's about giving back. That's something that I learned from my mother at a very young age.
In college I took an acting class as a joke. It sounded like something fun and easy at the time. I had originally wanted to go to art school, but I gave all that up because I didn't want to be a starving artist.
In my generation, except for a few people who'd gone into banking or nursing or something like that, middle-class women didn't have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything. I found that I got restless.
I hadn't really thought about going to college. Nobody in my family went away to school. The other piece of that was I didn't see anybody else in my hometown going to college to give me some kind of influence or something like that you might want to think about. I didn't see any of that. Therefore I thought it was never there. What happened was that my high school coach intervened. Had he not intervened to the measure he intervened, I probably wouldn't have gone.
I was on the yearbook staff, so I would take out film cameras and Nikons and take photos around school and at sporting events and things like that. We had a darkroom as well. I just loved it. I also saved up for a video camera to video my friends and cut and paste the videos together and I gave them to all of my friends for graduation.
I went to school to play sports, but I got involved in theatre in college kind of by mistake. I ended up taking an acting class almost just to get rid of an arts requirement, but I wound up in this wonderful acting class with this teacher named Alma Becker who really saved my life. I was just kind of this knucklehead kid from DC and I was in and out of trouble all of the time. I took a theatre class and she really discovered something in me and I absolutely fell in love with it.
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