- November 26, 2024
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Order: three tacos, two burritos. You have three minutes to have everything made, wrapped and bagged for the drive-thru. Go!
John Raymond, then 41, rushed through the order, stacking meat, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce. It was the summer of 2011, and all he could think about was that he never expected to sink this low, making minimum wage at Taco Bell, part-time.
“I was a 20-year professional, and kids were in charge of me,” Raymond recalled in an interview last week in his Palm Coast home. “I’m talking 21- or 22-year-olds, and I was washing dishes, and they were running the show.”
What made it worse was that, after his three minutes were up, and he sent the tacos and burritos to the cash register for this particular order, the food was sent back because the customer said no tomatoes. These young kids were his supervisors for a reason: They were faster and better at the job.
The country was in the Great Recession, and Raymond was in the middle of a career crisis. He was going to school to become a nurse, but nothing seemed to be going right. Normally an A student, he was getting C’s. The stress in the classroom and at home while he was studying was almost unbearable, with so much to memorize and so much pressure to get it right and provide for his wife, Kay, and three children, Logan, Malia and Chloe.
When he was home, “he withdrew,” Kay recalled.
“I went in the bedroom to study, and I never came out,” he said.
Finally, he talked to Kay one night about the nursing program and said, “Maybe this is out of my league.”
Aboard the aircraft carrier
Raymond was used to stress of a different kind. When he first stepped onto the aircraft carrier as a young man, he had to hold onto someone’s belt loop as he was led from station to station. If you didn’t know where you were going, he said, “You could get sucked up into an intake and spit out as hamburger.”
There were 72 airplanes on the carrier, and they were constantly being raised from the hangar deck up to the flight deck, and then prepared for takeoff. Technicians in bright-colored suits darted from one corner of the deck to another in a tightly choreographed ballet. It was like “Top Gun,” he said.
But it was not always glamorous. During his career, he saw one man tumble end over end across the deck and then fall 85 feet to the water below. He saw a maintenance man lose a hand. Kay, who was also in the Navy, had a friend who was killed — he walked into a propeller was “sliced up,” she said — doing the same job John Raymond was doing.
“It was considered the most dangerous job in the world, other than a firefighter,” he recalled.
His job title was aviation boatswain’s mate launch-and-recovery equipment man, and his role was to operate an aircraft catapult. He would hook up the holdback bar to the plane so that when its afterburners were firing, it stayed in place. He had a checklist with each launch: There were lights to monitor and other technicians who would give him the thumbs up or down as the steps were followed. And finally, he would press the fire button, and the incredible pressure that had been building in the hydraulic system would release. The aircraft would break through the metal tension bar and catapult 150 feet in 1.5 seconds, getting just enough lift to soar into the air above the ocean.
In the beginning, he said, “It was the scariest thing I had ever done.”
If that’s the case, I asked during an interview in his Palm Coast home, why would it be so stressful to think about becoming a nurse?
The stress of being on the aircraft carrier wore off eventually, he said. It became just a job. “It was repetitious. It was all timed, and you do it over and over again, 12 hours a day.”
He was an expert. In control on the flight deck. Moreover, during his time on the base, his schedule was mapped out for him. He knew exactly what he had to do every day.
But while he was taking classes as a nurse, and as he started working as an assistant with actual patients, one thing became even more real to him than it ever was on the flight deck: “I’ve got people’s lives in my hands.”
‘I could marry that man’
It was 1996, and Kay Raymond was fresh out of boot camp. Her rank in the Navy was “airman” — as low as you can get. She arrived in Maryland and didn’t know many people, other than a friend named Rob, who agreed to give her a ride to Walmart. But first, they had to pick up Rob’s friend at the gate to camp.
Rob asked Kay to sit in the back so his friend to could sit up front with him, and that ticked her off. Then she was introduced to Rob’s friend, John Raymond.
He turned around and said over his shoulder, “Hi.”
“I saw his eyes,” Kay recalled, “and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. I could marry that man.’”
The whole night at Walmart, John ignored her.
But over the next couple of years, they became friends. When Kay got engaged to someone else, John knew he had to act fast.
I asked Kay what made her finally call things off with Harold, and John interrupted: “When I gave her the kiss.”
Kay corrected him: “No! I kissed you!”
Then, one night they watched a movie, and on an impulse, Kay grabbed his face, kissed him and walked out the door.
John stood there, in shock.
Then Kay called Harold to call off the wedding.
After The Kiss, in 1998, they started talking about their future, and the biggest question arose: Where were they stationed next?
As fate would have it, they both were stationed in Washington state, only a few hours’ drive away from each other.
“It could have been oceans apart,” Kay said.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1999, John asked her to marry him.
Welcome to Palm Coast
After Kay got out of the Navy in 2000, they began traveling together wherever Jon was stationed. Over the next several years, John and Kay added on to their family. In Washington, their son, Logan, was born. In Sicily, Malia was born. And in Pensacola, Chloe arrived.
Finally, the time came for John to retire from the Navy after two decades of service. He knew there were no jobs as a catapult man in the private sector, so he debated what to do with his second career. He filled out a resume for the first time since he was practically a kid. Then a friend named Jennifer Figueroa, whose husband at the time was on the same ship with John in Washington, told John that she was going to try a nursing program at Daytona State College, on a campus in a town called Palm Coast.
Plans were made, and the Raymonds moved into town in the spring of 2009.
But the coursework was much harder than he had imagined, and on top of that, he was attempting to cram two years of preliminary coursework into 1.5 so that he could get into the nursing program faster and therefore start providing for his family faster.
“I was barely passing,” John recalled. “I was used to getting A’s, but I had to work twice as hard as I usually did in school, and I got half the grade. I was always worried about failing, about hurting patients. I felt so uncomfortable going from working on machines (on the aircraft carrier) to working on people.”
They lived with friends for about a year, and John and Kay felt like they were losing control of their family life. Finally, they bought a house because they felt it was the only option.
He started to withdraw at this point. He felt depressed. He felt like a failure. On top of the stress of school, he was also out of money. He got the job at Taco Bell in St. Augustine, but it didn’t last long because he was using up practically all of his earnings in gasoline costs. He and his family moved in with friends to save money.
“We never went out to eat, never went to the movies,” Kay Raymond recalled. “We didn’t rent movies. We cut cable.”
During the summer of 2011, when the kids were out of school, Kay worked part-time, and John was home with the kids for part of the day, but he was always in his bedroom studying. So, in a family where TV time had been usually limited to one hour per day and Kay’s goal was to stay home with them, now the kids were being babysat by the TV. Logan was the oldest, at 10.
“The kids were kind of running the show,” John said.
“Because of our situation, Chloe doesn’t remember me as a stay-at-home mom,” Kay said. “I went to work when she was 2.”
Sometimes she was home, sometimes she was working two different shifts during the day. “It was all jumbled,” John said.
Two personal tragedies added to what was proving to be the most difficult time their family had experienced so far: His sister committed suicide, and then his grandmother died.
John started having panic attacks and talked about going on medication to deal with the stress.
He was just a few months away from finishing his degree, but his confidence was gone. He wasn’t really a nurse. He belonged on an aircraft carrier. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to memorize whole textbooks of information about the human body. Even with all the information, it was overwhelming to think of being on his own, deciding how to save someone who was suddenly dying on a hospital bed in front of him.
He had nightmares of disasters happening with his patients.
Maybe, it would be better to quit the degree and try to become a licensed practical nurse, instead of an RN. He would make less money, but it would be less responsibility, less risk of failure.
“I was thinking, ‘Eventually I’ll have to start taking care of people,’” John said. “And you think, ‘You’re going to have a license, and they’re your patients, and you have to remember all this knowledge.’ And you feel insignificant. You feel inadequate.”
A job at last
With the support of Kay and prayer and friends, John Raymond decided to finish. He took his certification exam and passed.
It should have made him feel better. But it didn’t.
“For so long, I saw this scowl on his forehead, and he walked around with this cloud over his head,” Kay said. “He wasn’t grumpy, but he was unapproachable.”
Then, in April 2013, John Raymond got a full-time job as a nurse. At church, he spoke briefly to the congregation and expressed his gratitude. He was overwhelmed.
“When he got the job and had done it a few days, the relief was so evident,” Kay said. “The marks on his forehead had gone away. They literally smoothed overnight.” He looked younger, she said.
John Raymond said he still has feelings every morning, even though it has been almost six months since he got the job at Florida Hospital Memorial Medical Center, in Daytona Beach.
“When I drive to work, I start overthinking,” he said with a big grin, “about stupid stuff.” He thinks about worst-case scenarios. But, the anxiety of not knowing what to do for a struggling patient has reduced, too, now that he sees he has a support system at the hospital. “Everybody there is so helpful,” he said. “If I have a problem, I just call out and ask, and somebody will be there for help.”
‘Math hates me’
And now, it’s Kay’s turn.
When John got his job, Kay was able to quit hers. And now, she has started her own college education, which she put off in order to have children.
“I want to become an addictions counselor,” she said. “There’s a lot of addiction in my family that I grew up around. I’m thinking more toward the youth who are addicted. If I can change their lives at that age, then they can have a fuller, happier life without the drugs, and they can influence their kids and their families later on.”
And so, after spending the summer making up for lost time with Logan, Malia and Chloe, she went to take the entrance exam at Daytona State College — and to face her demon.
“She hates math,” John Raymond said.
“Math hates me,” she said.
She didn’t do so well on the math portion of the entrance exam, but she had just helped John through his quest to get a job, and she had also just recently faced two other demons: She had shed 18 pounds by exercising and, although she hated running, she had recently completed a 5k race, which happened to be held on the campus of DSC.
If she could run at DSC, she could figure out how to do math, she decided.
It’s working so far. Although her recent Facebook post shows her views about algebra (“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAGHGHGHGHGGH Letters and numbers together should be outlawed!!!!”), she has worked extra hard and spent extra time to receive A’s and B’s in most of her assignments so far in the fall 2013 semester.
It has been a long road from the aircraft carrier to math class for the Raymonds, but they now feel they have reached the end of the beginning and are more ready than ever to take on the middle — together.
— Email Brian McMillan at [email protected].
