"The best I could do is the best I could do" comes to mind when attempting to answer the question posed. Hindsight is always 20-20, and I can't imagine anyone not wanting to do something over again if given the opportunity, but we know we cannot go back in time; therefore, what's the use in crying over spilt milk.

If I must, however, I would say that I would like to go back in time to when I was about 14 years old and not have thyroid disease. Not having that disease would have changed my life considerably, I believe. Grave's disease made me hyperthyroid, and I started losing weight--down to 99 pounds--as well as having no energy. My heart rate was 140 sitting still. I could not hold a pencil steady in school or concentrate. It took nine months for doctors to get my thyroid regulated and heart beat down to about 60 beats per minute before they could operate on me and remove the two small grapefruit-sized glands. The surgery took place at Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, in February 1967. Dr. Charles Davis was the surgeon. Then I was home for several weeks and returned to school with doctor's orders to nap every afternoon in Nurse McBride's infirmary and not to participate in gym. Finally, by the end of the 10th grade, I started making much better grades.

Thyroid disease is such an insidious disease, it slips up on you without your realizing it--particularly when you're only 13-15 years old. By the time I underwent treatment, surgery, and continued treatment, the foundation of my high school years had passed. I did not apply myself, mainly because I couldn't!

So if I could do it all over again, I would have not had thyroid disease, would have applied myself in school, and perhaps furthered my education by attending a four-year institution of higher learning after graduation from high school.

All that said, knowing what I know now, I probably would not have made it through math in college because I have self-diagnosed myself with dyscalculia, a learning disability not discovered until about the time I graduated from high school in 1970. Math has always been my bugaboo! After learning about dyscalculia, I now know why. My best grades in school were in English, typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping, and I carried those skills to their ultimate by becoming a court reporter.

My husband, who graduated with a bachelor's degree from Guilford College in Guilford, NC, in 1968, always told me that I made much more money as a court reporter than I ever would have made as a college graduate, so that helped me not feel too badly about not graduating from a four-year college.

I attended Princess Anne Business College after graduation from high school, graduing with honors, and then worked for a year or two as a secretary. Later, I returned to school to learn court reporting and graduated again after about two years of study. During the early 1990s I enrolled in the University of Alabama External Degree Program through the National Court Reporters Association, and there I took all the writing courses and one science course and had an 4.0 average when I went on hiatus due to a 10,000-page backlog of transcript pages at work in federal court. I never returned to complete the degree.

The rest of my education has been self-taught. So I truly have no regrets but that I would like to have been healthier to see if I could have done better in school. Maybe; maybe not. I'm just happy to be here, and I appreciate what good fortune I have had and the hard knocks I have had to deal with, all of which have made me into the person that I am today. I just hope my journey continues for some time.