Most of you know I was a nurse in my previous life. Intensive Care was my field, and I loved it. I loved the high “tech-ness” of it, and the adrenalin rush every day. It was incredibly rewarding to make a difference in the lives of my critically ill patients and their families. There is nothing that binds people together like a life and death situation. Back in those days, I also did some moonlighting in an outpatient clinic that took care of all sorts of patients – OB/GYN, plastic surgery, ophthalmology, general medicine and surgery – pretty much everything. It was interesting, but my true love was ICU.

A few years into my career, my dad got sick. He had his first heart attack, and back then, they were not doing coronary bypass surgery for his kind of MI. He was treated medically, and did pretty well for almost a year. Then he had another MI, and it was downhill from there. I lived in my own apartment by then, but I was summoned to my parents’ house at least once or twice a week to check on Dad. He developed complications and got to the point where there wasn’t anything more to be done for him, short of a heart transplant. And they weren’t doing many of those back then. (Wow – I sound pretty ancient, don’t I?)

My dad’s last hospitalization lasted about 36 hours. His cardiologist gave him (and us) the option of putting him in ICU (with all the IV lines, tubes and monitors) but he said the outcome was extremely unlikely to be good. The other option was to admit him to a private room where we (my mom and siblings) could stay with him for the duration. Dad took Option 2. We were all with him when he passed away. My four siblings and I were all in our 20s. My mom was 56.

I burned out of nursing shortly after that. Turns out, the experience with my dad – watching him struggle for breath, seeing his EKG monitor doing all kinds of things it shouldn’t, noticing the veiled awareness of doom in his eyes – was something I experienced almost every day at work. And I found I couldn’t do it any more. I turned in my resignation and figured I’d have to find something else to do.

My supervisor refused to take my resignation (which turned out to be a really good thing for me!). She asked me to go into teaching in my hospital’s multiple ICUs – preparing and giving “in-service” classes on disease states, new medical treatments, and new technologies that were coming our way. I took her up on it, and at the same time, went back to college for another degree – something unrelated to science or nursing. History.

And that’s how I started on the path to writing historical romances. I actually went back to clinical nursing after about a year and a half, and still practiced nursing when I got married and had children. When my kids were young, I worked two or three afternoon shifts in the ICU every week, and after a long, tense shift, I would write to unwind – because it was impossible to go to sleep some nights after work. Somewhere along the line, somebody gave me a historical romance to read (I think it might have been Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss) and so I found myself inspired to write a romance of my own. The history and the happy ending really appealed to me.

The rest is… history, as they say. My eighteenth novel, Seducing the Governess, just came out, and my nineteenth (Brazen) is a December 2011 release. Funny how things happen.

Has your life taken a twist or turn that you never expected? Tell me about it and I’ll choose one commenter to receive a copy of Wild, one of my recent books.

Have a great week, everyone – and Happy March tomorrow. Spring is on its way!