Journal From Iraq: A Nurse's Story

by Deenie Laskey

Overview

In the summer of 1960, a ten-year-old girl was playing with her sister in the living room of their Midwestern family home. That was not so unusual. What was unusual was the image on the black-and-white television screen that caught her eye. It caused her to stop dead in her tracks. It was just a commercial, but she didn't want to miss a second of it! It was telling a story! Little did she know at the time, in many ways, it was telling her story.
What she saw was the ship called SS Hope, a floating hospital ship. It traveled the globe with doctors and nurses to far-reaching destinations. Their mission was to give medical care to people where few others like to go. From that moment on, that little girl knew her destiny. God had a plan for her.
She became a nurse, she joined the army reserve, and deployed to Saud Arabia in Desert Storm, Kosovo, and Iraq. She went where few wanted to go; she saw what few wanted to see. Her passion was to take care of our nation's wounded heroes. Go with her as she journals her way through the frustrations, demands, failures, and successes in a combat support hospital to a war zone during Iraqi Freedom.
Wisconsin nurse deployed to Iraq in 2006 with the 399th Combat Support Hospital.
https://youtu.be/uPdET5nHnjk

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162807155
Publisher:	Covenant Books
Publication date:	05/11/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Geraldine Laskey, known to everyone as Deenie, is the author behind Journal from Iraq: A Nurse’s Story. As a new nurse, she quickly discovered she loved the adrenalin rush of the emergency room. It’s where she could work hard, think fast, and stay focused to organize chaos. She used those skills not only in the emergency department for over twenty-five years but took her expertise with her on her multiple mission trips. There’s a soft spot in Deenie’s heart for faraway places. Working alongside missionaries, she traveled and organized medical walk-in clinics in both Germany and Russia. She was awarded the Humanitarian Service Medal. As an army reservist, her trauma skills were utilized in three deployments: Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm, Kosovo, and in 2006, her final deployment to Iraq. Now she shares that story with you, her personal account of that moment in history.
After four decades of nursing and twenty-five years in the army reserves, the lieutenant colonel was ready to hang up her military uniform and hospital scrubs. She is now happily retired, living in La Crosse, Wisconsin, with her husband, Robert Laskey, who is also a military veteran.
There is a sign in their front yard which reads, “Old Soldier’s Home.” Robert once recorded a song for her which contained this lyric, “There’s a hole in the world where you should be.” Deenie has found that place!
She finds great pleasure in beekeeping, singing an enthusiastic soprano in the Coulee Region Gospel Choir, traveling to scenic and interesting places around the globe with her husband, and loving on her grandkids every chance she gets. In her quiet times, she enjoys her very own eclectic library. She admits to dusting more books than she will ever live long enough to read.
Every spring, since returning from Iraq, she faithfully plants the next generation of sunflower seeds. They are descendants of the original sunflowers grown in Iraq.
Deenie concedes, though her age is slowing her pace a bit and endurance sometimes wanes, she is still faithfully fixing her eyes on Jesus.
“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus…” (Hebrews 12:1–2a)