The frank and endearing true story of Peggy Butler, a young girl from the Appalachian foothills of southern Ohio, who loves music and dreams of becoming a performer, until an illness in her early teens changes her goal and her life dramatically. This stirring memoir offers a vivid picture of what it was like to be an aspiring nurse in the 1950s. Butler's accounts of the stigma endured by people with tuberculosis, a contagious disease with no known cure at that time, are heart-rending.