Drive-by Posting: Taking Stock, Before Taking Off
Have just finished a second week of interviews with principal investigators, and am taking a moment to take stock.
I've been very lucky to have been given the chance to have private chats with many of the most senior cancer investigators in the world. Members of the Institute of Medicine. Holders of lifetime achievement awards from the world's great oncology organizations. And in those meetings, under conditions of total confidentiality, I got to learn about the very latest work their labs are pursuing. Findings no one else in the world has seen yet. And discoveries in the process of being published which will hit like thunderbolts. My backpack has a navy blue folder filled with almost thirty pages of handwritten notes detailing the most advanced cancer science known to man. Discovery after discovery, finding after finding, lab after lab.
People's lives are going to be saved by the stuff I learned about.
And I get to pick up where they leave off.
I think about all my family has given me to get this far, a lifetime of love and support. I think about all that my teachers and mentors have given me, through all my schooling and training. I think of all the friends who shared their friendship and laughter, all along the way. And I think of my country.
Once upon a time, leaders like the two Roosevelts, like Truman, like Kennedy and Johnson, worked to create an America where the Astors and the Vanderbilts paid in, to give ordinary folks like me the chance to reach for the stars. The public schools and public universities, the federally funded scholarships and training programs, the taxpayer subsidized medical school training and fully taxpayer supported residency training, all the opportunities that gave a boy born in an auto plant town the chance to become a physician-scientist at the furthest edge of human knowledge. And I am deeply, deeply grateful.
We are living in a changing America, now. An America of George W Bush and Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Grover Norquist. Only time will tell what that means for those who will come after me. Whether they will get the same chances I did. That question is a matter for politics and activism and so much else, which has weighed on all our minds recently. But whatever the future holds, I was lucky enough to benefit from that social compact, whatever it's future may be. And for that, I too am deeply grateful.
It has been a busy week of intense science. Many busy weeks of intense clinical service. Work that went well, and work that did not go so well, battles we won, battles we drew, battles we lost. Frustration and anger and grief and all else that is the common experience of all of us in this place.
And so grateful I am for the little bits of escape. Of a merry dinner with friends in Falls Church. Another merry dinner with friends in Greenbelt. Of plans for the future, for adventures far and wide. Of the warm hospitality of Jesse's family, who has been my kind host during these weeks in Bethesda and Baltimore. And now, to close up this laptop and head to the airport, on the way to Boston and dawntreader42 for a Saturday of food and games and laughter and dance, before returning to St. Louis and duty.
So much to be grateful for.
So much to be thankful for.
Be well, my friends.
And thank you.