At 17, Quentin Tesi had a son and no job. So he enlisted in the Army reserve, rising in the ranks to become a flight medic in the Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
That wasn’t his plan, nor would it be the Grand Canyon University student's path.
“I went to the University of Toledo on a football scholarship,” he said. “And then, I had a son when I was 17. It kind of changed the course from playing college football to the Army.”
Higher education was essential, so he snagged a bachelor's degree in construction management.
“One class at a time,” he said. “It seemed like the easiest degree to earn while in the Army. When I was stationed in Alaska, I was given the Army’s ‘Whiskey-1’ test (a grueling combat medic specialist advance training test). I was training at the Northern Training Center with the Army’s premier mountaineering and survival force.”
After that advanced training to become a medic, he had six global deployments. A paramedic during the COVID pandemic, Tesi found himself running a civilian emergency department in Romania.
“I ran the department or worked shifts in the department as a provider, which was very, very, very interesting,” he said. “(There were times that) people were looking at me like, ‘What are we doing?’ I’d say, ‘You're a doctor. I'm not a doctor.’”
Tesi was on a NATO deployment in Romania when the pandemic hit. Although, technically, he should have been redeployed, the COVID era kept him in the Eastern European nation for over a year. He discovered a passion for saving lives and decided to pursue a nursing degree.
“I tried to do one class at a time, however, it was kind of challenging, so I got out (of the Army),” he said, medically retiring in 2021 and worked for the U.S. Department of State for a year. “My ex-wife gave me the ultimatum to continue doing world missions or be married, and I stepped away from the Army and school and went into private security.”
He worked for the Sheldon Adelson family, the owners of the largest international gaming corporation in the world. He did that for a year, but his passion to help kept calling.
Moving from a military deployment as a medic and into nursing in GCU's Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program wasn’t a straight line.
“I've done (medical care) at a pretty high level,” Tesi said.“Two years ago, I started with one class at a time. After I got divorced, I decided to go to school full time so I could prioritize being at home and having a family, so that what happened wouldn’t happen again.”
During his military service, he enrolled in GCU. A deployment to Nigeria caused him to drop his course. But after his discharge, he tried again. Tesi enrolled in two nursing courses at another institution before transferring to the ABSN program at Grand Canyon.
As he traveled the meandering path, he found a centering with his faith.
“Call me a lukewarm Christian,” he said. “I believed, I went to church, but I wasn't really active in my faith, and I wasn't pursuing my relationship with God.”
It’s said that there are no atheists in foxholes. Tesi found his faith challenged by seeing “horrible things in horrible places being done by terrible people.”
“And I was losing people, amazing people. I questioned a lot about my faith," he said. “Then we had more than one occasion (that I can say), the only reason I'm here is divine intervention.”
At the time, he was deployed in the Middle East and found himself falling to his knees.
“I was surrendering (to God),” Tesi said.“It changed everything. And really, there has been no turning back.”
After such an experience and with his skills, could he say that nursing became his calling?
“I really struggle with what my calling was after being a warrior,” Tesi said. “I chose to be a medic because I wanted to help people. I was very good at being a medic. Helping people now satisfies my purpose. I really struggle (to know) if it’s the right answer.”
Finding his path and seeing a destination is still in the cards for him. Tesi wants to specialize in service in the intensive care unit or emergency department at a hospital. His skill was keeping people alive in emergency and traumatic situations.
“I get affirmations all the time, but I'm still like, ‘OK, am I on the right path?’” he questions. “Am I doing the things that I'm called to do? I'm certain that helping people is my calling, I just don't know what capacity yet, and so we're on this path until we're not on this path.”
And he'll keep walking that path until he finds his destination.
GCU senior writer Eric Jay Toll can be reached at [email protected].
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