As a reporter I hear inspirational stories all the time. After all, I’m in the business of telling compelling stories and people pitch them all the time.

But now and again I encounter one that’s so good I think if someone pitched it for a memoir or a biopic they’d be told it’s too on the nose.

Then I heard the story of Elizabeth Moses this weekend at the pinning ceremony for nursing students at Costa Mesa-based West Coast University. This is a good one, folks.

She grew up in the West African country of Sierra Leone, an upbringing scarred by war and poverty. Fortunately, she met a housemate there who brought her to California. She knocked around from roommate to roommate when she arrived in 2001 in what sounded like a rather Dickensian adventure until a fellow African took her in and helped her settle down. She started taking classes at community colleges, but her dream of being a registered nurse fell through twice as she failed to complete the programs.

Then she enrolled in the 18-month program at West Coast University’s Anaheim campus. Happy ending, right? Wrong. Then her troubles really began.

Her brother Deji died. He was just 32. He was epileptic and had a seizure. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in questions, but Elizabeth said it appeared he did not receive the basic care anyone in that situation would have gotten. As a nurse she knows no one should die of a simple seizure. He was just 32.

Still, she kept studying.

Then she got pregnant with her son, Tommy. Impossible, she thought. For seven years she tried to get pregnant without success because of a problem with her fibroids. The doctors told her the condition might complicate the pregnancy.

Still, she kept studying.

Three weeks after Tommy was born, without complications, she learned that her cousin Busoler died.

Throughout all of this her husband Ade lost his job and they lost their condo. Without shelter from her friends her family would have been homeless.

Still, she kept studying.

Last week she passed the boards and she’s a registered nurse.

She credited her professors with helping her through the already grueling dead heat that West Coast University offers nursing students. It’s a straight-through process with only a couple of weeks off for the holidays. It helps students fast-track their career. Elizabeth said in the other R.N. programs her professors were too rigid, incapable of appreciating her personal problems, but West Coast’s teachers nurtured her. I could see that as the school’s top administrators hugged and congratulated her, genuinely thrilled with her success story.

I also saw it in her classmates. Stacie Alvarado had been elected to be one of the two class speakers at the pinning ceremony on Saturday, but she yielded the spotlight to Elizabeth, calling her onstage to tell us her story. Stacie did that because she hadn’t learned the full extent of Elizabeth’s travails until the last day of class after she was elected class speaker. After Elizabeth told her tale, Stacie struggled to maintain her composure and soldiered through the rest of her speech.

“Today I thank God  for this school,” Moses said. “The teachers here are out to help everyone. They are all empathetic. Some of them even helped me out financially. By God’s grace I took the exam and I am now an RN.”

Congratulations, Elizabeth. ‘Nuff said.

(Many thanks to Image Group LA for the outstanding photo).

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