Penny Rock was a child prodigy, excelling in music as a teenager and young woman.  Her voice spanned four octaves, with power and clarity at both ends of that range.  In her teens, she sang opera arias and played classical piano with the Minnesota Symphony.  Unable to afford Julliard, she entered nursing to create a mobile career that would support her study of opera. 

 

The Army provided a scholarship for nursing school, with a vague promise that Germany, the hotbed of opera, would be a “likely” posting.  With a nursing degree in hand and specialties in cardio-vascular and thoracic surgery, the Army sent her to Vietnam, where she served for thirteen months in the Third Field Hospital, a receiving point for the wounded coming straight from the battlefield. 

 

She served during some of the worst times of the war, and it was during the Tet Offensive that snipers breached the hospital compound and she was shot in the back while running into the open to rescue an injured child.  During this time, she was continuously exposed to the toxic gas Agent Orange, her hospital being in the area most heavily sprayed.  A final injury- a throat infection – destroyed her ability to sing and ended her career plans to sing opera. 

 

The wounds she suffered have caused her a lifetime of pain and discomfort, but they also helped her find a natural resiliency that has since guided her life’s work.  “We all experience difficulties throughout our lives – no one gets a free ride – but while some incorporate those difficulties and move beyond, many hold them in their thinking and struggle for their entire lives.  The negative thoughts they carry provide a screen through which they view the world, their job, relationships, and family.” 

 

It is this understanding that has shaped her career, and her writing: “the knowledge that each person has the ability to transcend and benefit from any life experience.”