Susan Anthony, 32

As Carlson spoke, Garcia shook her head.

“I told her there’s no such thing as giving up,” Garcia said.

“I didn’t give up,” Carlson said. “My dream was taken from me. I didn’t give up.”

Anthony reduced her working hours at an emergency room and worked night shifts to attend classes at Stone Academy before it abruptly closed. Her plans after school are up in the air.

“We need support now more than ever,” she said. “This is a very huge tragedy for us. Not just financial support, but moral support, emotional support, all of that.”

When Anthony goes in to work at Hartford Hospital, sometimes she sees nursing students and it brings tears to her eyes.

“That should be me,” she said. It took a week to call her mom and tell her she was no longer a student at Stone Academy because the school had shut down eight months into Anthony’s 22-month program.

At first, she just got a headache. It was a surreal feeling when she got the email saying the school would not be continuing classes.

When the news finally hit her, she couldn’t stop crying. Some days, when she would go in to work, Anthony would break down in tears in her coworkers’ arms. She didn’t know how to spend her free time, which was usually occupied by reading her textbook, watching nursing videos on YouTube or studying.

Two months later Anthony still has days where she wants to go into the back room and cry. She struggled with suicidal thoughts for a few weeks.

“It felt like I was grieving,” she said. “I was this close to calling the resource counselors that they have for employees at work just to see if I can have someone to talk to.

“I felt like I was going to need counseling after this, like emotional counseling. I needed someone. I needed constant reassurance that I was going to be OK. There were times where I went to work and I’d be very angry, I’d be very sad, I’d be crying.”

It felt like “cruel timing,” she said. Anthony, who is originally from New York City, previously worked as a medical assistant at a hospital in Brooklyn. She had been accepted into a nursing internship, then the hospital shut down and filed for bankruptcy.

When she moved to Hartford a few years ago, she enrolled at Goodwin University in East Hartford for its registered nursing program. She transferred out of the school after feeling “misled” and said an academic adviser was trying to make her take additional classes and prerequisites she already completed.

She needed another school with flexibility and applied to three other Connecticut nursing programs including at Capital Community College and Stone Academy. She was waitlisted at Capital, and her eagerness got the better of her.

Now she has to depend on affirmations, prayer and staying busy to get by the next few months as she waits for answers.

“All the encouragement that I’ve been receiving gave me a lot of strength. … But progress is not perfection,” Anthony said. “I’m not going to lie: I’m not OK.

“I was always told if you’re not OK, yell it out, and I’m not OK. It’ll get to someone’s ear. Something will be done about it. … a lot of us aren’t OK.”