I was a registered nurse for many years before I retired, having worked mostly in teaching hospitals in Toronto. In my book Resurrection; and Rescuing God, I included four short stories about some of my nursing experiences, writing also about how God intervened in a miraculous way for my patients. The book is dedicated to my adopted daughter Shawna, now deceased. In it I also write about racism, especially as it concerns Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, Blacks and Jews. Shawna was part Black and part Irish: mixed-race. (Quite frankly, I believe that we are all mixed-race.) She too suffered racism. This happened in the last foster home she was in where she was spanked whenever she became deeply hypoxic (low oxygen levels), because she squatted on her haunches to alleviate her deep hypoxia, doing so automatically, it being a mechanism to defend the body’s oxygen levels as best as possible. When she started school, she suffered terribly due to plain ugliness at the hands of some very ignorant teachers, who could not understand that because she suffered from a serious heart condition, it took her longer to go to the washroom at recess, and then put on her snowsuit to play outside. I begged them to give her more time to do so, because she wanted to play like the other children; this was when she was in grade one; it was a Roman Catholic School. They simply viewed me with scorn whenever I attempted to explain to them my daughter’s heart condition; I was only a registered nurse who apparently knew nothing. They did not do as I asked. Instead, they made Shawna stand in front of her three grade one classes (it was an open-area-type school) and “apologize for disrupting God’s lesson” because she wet her pants during the same, she having failed to go to the washroom at recess because she did not have sufficient time to do so and play outside. It takes a long time for a deeply hypoxic child to put on a snowsuit (we lived in Toronto, Canada, where it comes frigidly cold in the winter). I realize now, that these young teachers did not believe me when I told them, that although I was unmarried I adopted Shawna, because The Holy Spirit guided me to do so; in fact, He hounded me until I did so. It had only recently become law that unmarried people could adopt; as well, very few people knew much in the 1960 and 70s––I adopted Shawna in 1970 when she was just turned three years––about congenital heart anomalies, Dr. Mustard having just pioneered the heart-lung machine at Toronto’s Hospital For Sick Children 15 to 20 years before. Well read persons knew, but these teachers knew only how to bully a seriously disabled child; and they certainly were not well read. I learned about what Dr. Mustard had accomplished when I was 14 years old, reading all about it in the Windsor Star one Saturday evening. This was in 1954; I did not enter nursing until 1958. The fact was, that Shawna’s hypoxic state could be heard several feet away, due to her laboured breathing whenever she was active; as well, her lips, nail beds, and eyelids were always blue in colour. Any intelligent person would have noticed the same signs of a serious heart condition. Believe-it-or-not, a school record about Shawna’s apparent lack of intelligence and complete unsuitability for school, was begun then by those grade one teachers, which report followed her all through school–– a report about which I knew nothing until long after all the damage had been done, because what the teachers started fellow pupils, especially little girls, finished. Little girls can be exceedingly cruel, relentlessly so, year, after year, after school year. BUT THE TEACHERS STARTED THE UGLINESS, an ugliness the students noticed and simply followed through on. At least the evil labelling of children as suffering from so-called ADDH had not yet arrived in the teacher’s jargon, because had Shawna been put on psychostimulant drugs it would have killed her sooner than a bunch of school girls would. Canada’s laws have always been that a child has to attend school, even if disabled. There was only one school in Toronto then, that took in seriously disabled children, but it was filled to capacity; I tried to enter Shawna in it, begging them to take her, but to no avail. Shawna died prematurely when she was 45-years-old, an alcoholic, being subjected to snide comments from nurses caring for her the last three months of her life–– they blamed her excessive use of alcohol upon the fact that she was dying, the abuse having begun at the age of seventeen years when the Roman Catholic School system finally told her that it was pointless for her to continue to attend school, whereupon she was forced to study woodworking. She was finding herself back at school again, on her deathbed, not being able to escape bullying even as she was dying, from young female nurses; she was dying chiefly from Hepatitis C which she had contracted from one of the many blood products she received when she hemorrhaged twice following her open heart surgery which she underwent a week before her seventh birthday, a condition which could not be treated because of her heart arrhythmias due to open heart surgery. The nurses knew, you see, that Shawna had also been born addicted to heroin, so they accused her–-and me––of being drug addicts. They too did not believe me when I told them that I had adopted Shawna when she was three-years-old. In fact, these nurses abused Shawna verbally until she took her last breath. But God embraced her, and took her home with Him. He snatched her away from their utter ugliness, exactly 42 years to the day she became legally mine. He gave her to me, and He took her away. I had learned all that I needed to know, so that I could write about it in due course. I have written a book exclusively about Shawna, but it will not be ready for publication for some time. First I must finish an historical text I am writing. Writing is, for me, a rather slow activity. Sometimes I have bursts of writing energy, and then at other times I find I am writing practically at a snail’s pace. Research takes up a lot of time; as well as locating books, especially rare ones. But I will do it. What I have had to learn began with Shawna you see, yet it did not end there.