Your Story is Your Medicine: A Prescription for Healing in an Imperfect World

A memoir of the first blind nurse to hold a license and to work as a Registered Nurse in the state of Minnesota. While this is a unique story in itself, the larger story is the author's incredible tale of how she overcame continual, catastrophic medical challenges and learned to find lessons for her soul within the devastation. Through her narrative and reader-based inquiries, the reader is guided on how to live with joy and peace despite past circumstances and a future that is not guaranteed.

Long before blindness or her nursing career, Shelli's memoir begins with her diagnosis of juvenile diabetes in 1973. The disease becomes aggressive and out of control and eventually, Nelson finds herself clinging to a life raft as she is tossed furiously from one catastrophic medical event to another. Searching for ways to help her desperate situation, nelson embarks on an eight-year education in integrative therapies and is enlightened to the idea that all dis-ease has an emotional, mental and spiritual component. She opens a private practice of integrative medicine and counseling and a licensed school and begins teaching others what she is applying day-to-day in her own life.

This is the story of how Nelson not only survives, but how her resiliency grows as she discovers where her power truly lay. With trips from this side of the veil to the other as she clutches life on more than one occasion, she reaches an understanding about her true nature, about the power of surrender and the limitless possibilities within everyone.

Nelson writes with a rare honesty that's uncommon. Her ability to take the reader into her world provides not only chilling details of her experiences in her drive to stay alive, but also into the extreme tenderness of the heart. Although not everyone will have experienced blindness, multiple organ transplants and multiple cancer episodes, the reader will relate to her struggle as she learns to trust, to accept her vulnerability, to overcome fears great and small and how to live a life of joy and love despite living in a world that is often difficult and sometimes cruel.

This book is an essential read not only for those with chronic or serious illness, but for everyone as we all navigate through a complicated world that can be filled with betrayals, uncertainty, imperfection, feelings of fear and let-downs and heartbreaks. Nelson's courage is instructive and will provide readers with incentive and strength in difficult times. Her writing is captivating, her resolve infectious and her story will change how the reader moves forward in life.