36 and Pursuing Happiness...in Medicine!

  2020...Thank You!

I know that seems very dastardly and I am in NO way commenting on the hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to the corona virus in the US alone. But for me, 2020 gave me the face-slap I needed to knock me out of my complacency with my life.

And I was complacent, because I had finally found a good rhythm with my life. I woke up, got my daughters ready to go to daycare, dropped them off and went to work, came home from work, helped cook and eat dinner with my family, got the girls ready for bedtime and went to bed. REPEAT. In 2019, I had switched to a new department in my company and for the first time in years, I was actually excited to go to work and to learn how to work in my new role. It took almost 6 months, but I put in the time and effort to seamlessly transition from a Laboratory Biologist II in the Toxicology department to a Clinical Pathology Laboratory Biologist in the Laboratory Animal Medicine department. And I got a pay raise to go with it! Yay for making more money!

So life was better, and contentment is a good and bad thing. Due to my position change, I conveniently forgot about looking into Masters programs that I would be interested in. I had always wanted to pursue a Master's degree and my company offered the degree as a "benefit" for working full time. I already knew a dozen of my coworkers who had taken advantage of the benefit and had earned their Master's degrees, free of charge, just because they could. So I just kept my focus on my new position and doing well in it and...forgot about pursuing academic ambitions.

But just when I was starting to tell myself that "You know what? You can be happy working in this position for the rest of your life.", January 1st, 2020 happened. That was the day my husband had an emergent surgery to remove his gallbladder. He had complained of serious abdominal pain on the 30th and I told him to go to the emergency room. But it wasn't until the next day that they discovered his gallbladder was inflamed and infected and would need to be removed. For the first time in our 9 years of marriage, I had to briefly imagine possibly losing him and becoming a widower with two young daughters. I was on the border of HYSTERICAL. Fortunately, the surgeon seemed to understand my feelings without me saying so, and assured me that the surgery was minimally invasive and necessary. I'll never forget the reassurance he gave me not only with his words but with his eyes. My husband had a successful surgery and has been able to live his life back to normal with minimal changes to his diet.

Since that literally happened at the beginning of the year, I thought we'd be home free for the remainder. What a joke, thinking back on that time now. I received a call from my mom at 9 in the morning on a Tuesday in February, which is unheard of because she lives in Hawaii and the time zone difference to Chicago, IL is 5 hours. But she was calling me to let me know that my Tata was being admitted into hospice and that I should come back home to say my goodbyes to him. I was stunned. My Tata had always been a strong, healthy man. He stubbornly refused to use his walker and was constantly gardening and his diet consisted of mostly vegetables and bananas. But he was 98 years old, and had broken his hip last year around Thanksgiving. That injury was giving him difficulty in recovering at his age. So despite the financial burden it was to catch a flight to Hawaii that week, I arranged to take my youngest daughter, Skye. whom he hadn't met yet with me back to Hawaii for 3 days (Thursday to Sunday). Seeing my Tata in that vulnerable position was devastating, but even though he didn't remember who I was, I was happy to spend that short time with him. As we flew back that Saturday to Chicago, the coronavirus had begun to spread to the US, and less than a week later the state of Hawaii shut down travel to the state to protect its citizens from the virus outbreak. My Tata passed away on April 4th, and I couldn't be there for the funeral in May due to all the travel bans.

Not being able to be there with my family during a time of such loss still hurts me to this day. Even though I know there was nothing I could have done, I would have given anything to be there. And that's when I really started to think about my life and what I truly wanted out of it.