Larissa Stinson Garner’s day begins at 5:30 a.m. It ends whenever.

Garner, 39, is a nursing student at Hinds Community College’s Jackson Campus-Nursing/Allied Health Center. Five days a week, the mother of three leaves home about 7:30 a.m., drives to Jackson for class and leaves about 4 p.m. — after 6 on Tuesdays — to return to Vicksburg, a 100-mile round trip. After she gets home, there’s work around the house and studying to finish before going to bed.

It’s been a tough grind, but her work has paid off. Garner, who has a 4.0 average in her first year of nursing school, was the recipient of Hinds’ annual Carla McCulloch Scholarship for the fall semester. The scholarship was created by the McCulloch family in honor of their daughter, Carla, a nursing student who died in an accident in 1991.

When Garner graduated in 2009 from Hinds’ Vicksburg-Warren Campus, nursing was the last thing on her mind. It took the death of her cousin, Robert Foley III, to give her direction.

“He died from an aortic aneurism at St. Dominic’s,” she said. “He was very smart and he was a nuclear medicine technologist at River Region (Medical Center).

“When he died, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to do something in the health field and I wanted to be useful. Nursing was for me,” she said. “God just put nursing in my heart, and I knew that was my calling. I stayed in school to take the courses I needed to get into nursing school.”

The path that led her back to college and then to nursing school began 20 years ago, with a long break along the way.

A Vicksburg native, Garner graduated from Vicksburg High School in 1991, and attended classes at Hinds’ Raymond Campus with plans to major in secondary education.

“I took a semester off in 1993,” she said. “I was young, and I was burned out. It took me 15 years to get back.”

In that intervening time, Garner married, had three sons, divorced and remarried, and worked in the restaurant industry.

“I’ve done everything in the restaurant business but own a restaurant,” she said. “I’ve been a waitress, cook, manager, trained people. I’ve ordered the mash potatoes and served the potatoes.”

When she decided to return to school, she said, “I took a leap of faith and went at it. I prayed a lot.”

Returning to school after 15 years, she said, was an experience.

“I was working two full-time jobs and trying to keep up my grades,” she said. “I was taking 18 to 20 credit hours a semester.”

Garner called nursing school “a different ball game. It’s difficult; it’s much more challenging. When you take tests, you not only have to have the knowledge, you have to be able to apply what you know.”

One thing she enjoys is the clinical programs, which provide the students with practical experience working in a hospital.

“I had the opportunity to work at Baptist (Medical Center in Jackson) in the surgical and cardiac areas,” she said. “It’s an awesome feeling, knowing that what you’re doing is making a difference in a person’s life for the better.

“God is using me as an instrument of his healing power, and that’s an awesome feeling,” she said days before this week’s National Nursing Week, which will end Saturday, on the 192nd anniversary of Florence Nightingale, who laid the groundwork for professional nurses during the Crimean War.

If there’s one thing she misses, Garner said, “it’s the social life. It’s hard when my family wants to go to the lake or go fishing, and I can’t go because I have to study, but my family understands.”

She said her family has been highly supportive of her efforts, adding her husband, Michael, “takes care of a lot of the housework and works. He’s made some real sacrifices, too, and he’s provided a lot of prayer and encouragement.

She said she hopes her efforts serve as an example to her sons, Joshua, Jacob and Jess Barrett. Joshua, 17, is a senior at Warren Central High School; Jacob 15, attends Warren Central Junior High; and Jess, 11, is a student at Redwood Elementary.

“They’ve seen life as it was before college, with college, and hopefully, they’ll see the benefits after graduation,” she said.

Garner said Josh plans to follow her to Hinds to study auto mechanics.

“I appreciate what the McCullochs have done,” she said. “They have turned their tragedy into a blessing for other people. They’ve been sponsoring the scholarship for 21 years. That’s 21 people whose lives have been changed. Twenty-one people they’ve touched who have become nurses and touched lives.”

She plans to graduate next year, and said she has been accepted into the two-year nursing master’s degree program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

“But I’m undecided if I’m going to enter the program,” she said. “I may wait and see where God sends me.”