My Story

Like most young adults, I had little idea of what I wanted to do in life. I spent the first two years of college changing my major from Architecture to Astronomy, and again to Electrical Engineering, before my obligatory stint in Biology 101 lit a fire under me. It was in those early heady days when PCR had just hit the field and my classmates and I could amplify and visualize our own DNA with electrophoresis, and as I sat there in bio lab, staring at the shiny black-and-white picture with my newly-discovered third cousins (and other classmates), I thought, this is it. This is what I want to do. 

 

Not that I was entirely sure what "this" entailed. I initially kept a double-major in Electrical Engineering and Biology with the intent to design human-machine interfaces, but didn't have the skills or willpower in those days to study as much as I needed to, and so my math grades (and my animosity for the differential) prevented me from taking that path. It was another elective class taken a year before graduation, Foundations in Neuroscience, which inspired me to pursue a career in systems neurobiology, thereby fusing my desire to understand and further human health with my love of experimentation. I graduated with my bachelor's degree from Georgia State in 2002, and with a doctorate from Michigan State in 2008, where I'd specialized in neuroimaging. A well-known psychiatric institute sponsored my postdoctoral work in medical physics, and I was soon a faculty member at a prestigious medical university in New York. My primary responsibilities there lay in educating medical and graduate students, physicians, and researchers in medical physics, neuroimaging, and data analysis, and with designing, maintaining, and upgrading the complex scientific computing infrastructure so vital to our work. But in my "downtime," I was free to collaborate with other scientists and carry out research of my own. That downtime turned out to be rarer than I'd expected, but I figured I was paying my dues; I had a faculty title, was associated with notable people in the field, and the pay was good.

 

The leadership of that university, however, had made some very risky hedge fund investments, losing the school millions, and resulting in heavy layoffs among the faculty. I was one of them. And I quickly discovered that no other universities were willing to match my lavish salary -- despite my insistence that I was quite willing to work for much less, they (understandably) didn't believe me -- and since I'd had few publications over the previous few years, they weren't quite willing to take the risk.

 

It seemed my career as a scientist was over. I'd need to re-evaluate what made me happy, reinvent myself.

 

And reinvent I did. I started a small side business as a designer of electronic toys and gadgets, and obtained a position as a STEM teacher at a wonderful children's museum. I was sent to local elementary schools in the mornings to teach science and host fun science activities, and in the afternoons I did the same for programs for local children in need. I developed my own science program, Junior Gadgeteers, for young children, and soon parents were telling me their kids had been so inspired by "Dr. J" that they'd insisted on having their own areas set aside for experiments. "Dr. J" was beloved, revered. He was sought out by the museum's engineering team to help solve electronics issues. He was consulted by his colleagues for his expertise in science. Kids and parents came to the museum and asked for him by name.

 

Beloved...revered...pursued. It all sounds so strange and pretentious to me now. I'm embarrassed to admit, I bought into the persona.

 

Meanwhile, in real life, things had not been going so well. Not only were my wife and I preparing for an amicable divorce, but my mother's recent strange behavior had taken a frightening turn: her neighbors had been unable to get in touch with her for three days, and when they finally did, she had no idea where she'd been during that time or what she'd been doing. She needed someone to take care of her, at least until we'd figured out what was wrong. I packed my belongings and my cats and moved back to my hometown, several states away.

Things turned out to be badly wrong with Mom: she was eating off plates cleaned with laundry detergent, washing her hands with floor polish, and wandering the house at night. She'd been financially victimized by some of her "friends" and by con artists; she'd leave the oven on until smoke filled the house; and she was, at times, highly disoriented and violent.

 

Mom was soon diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia, and that diagnosis proved to be the start of a terrible crisis in both our lives. As she lost her memories and identity, her personality changed and she became abusive, which broke our relationship in two for a very short time -- but a time that seemed, and still seems, like ages -- before we were reconciled. No less than a month after that reconciliation she was admitted to inpatient care, where it was determined that she would need full-time supervision in a memory care facility. In the interim between my coming to live with her and her consignment to memory care, Mom suffered incredible physical and emotional pain which she could not verbalize to me or to her providers. She couldn't advocate for herself but fell further and further into helplessness, and all the while her medical providers, at a loss for a way to help her, could provide support only in the form of medication. When Mom threw away that medication, those providers were unable to refill the prescriptions. I've detailed our experiences elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that, when Mom and I were at our most vulnerable, we became invisible. Lacking financial stability and emotional and professional support, her final years were so much more painful than they needed to be.

 

What do I want to leave behind?

 

To this day, even after working through the pain of that time and having acknowledged that I didn't fail my Mom as a caregiver, I still carry regret for the loss of the days when she was still herself, and, having remarried, mourn that Mom will never meet her daughter-in-law or her grandchildren, whom she would have adored.

 

And, although I found a new job as a neuroscientist not long after Mom had entered memory care, I found that something had happened to me, too. Having shared the experiences of so many patients and families who've been confronted with serious -- even terminal -- illness, and the shortcomings of the biomedical model, I was no longer content to contribute to others' lives through research. As critical as science is, I felt that I had something more specific now to give to those in need: empathy, clarity, and hope. In the darkest hours of our lives, no knowledge or medicine will avail us without personal contact -- without seeing ourselves as a minute, but integral part, in the flow of time and humanity, life and death, hope and hopelessness, love, and pain, and recovery.

 

There's an observation in forensic science called Locard's exchange principle, which says that "Every contact leaves a trace." That is, everyone who enters a room brings something with them, and everyone leaving that room will leave something behind. Misapplying this principle to my own life, I had to ask myself: What will I leave behind? I decided to become a therapist because I wanted to be a touchstone for someone in pain -- because I had been in pain, and had no one to hear me; because there were difficult things that I'd needed to hear, and no one to tell me; because I once had things to say and no one to listen. I've come out of those times better and stronger for them, but others might not. No one deserves to be totally alone, even though everyone, at some point, is.

 

I had started my journey as "Dr. J," a scientist, an inventor, a teacher... a persona. Witnessing my Mom's decline and pain, realizing that the entirety of my expertise and experience was wholly incapable of staving off the inevitable which faces us all, and understanding that only love and understanding could ease that inevitability, was deeply humbling. At the end of my journey I had been stripped bare of my presumptions. I had ended as I'd started in life: as a fellow participant in the human race. This newfound humility left me with a calling, where before there had only been purpose.

 

To me, being a therapist is a commitment to my membership in the human race: my way to give to others who need someone to listen, provide some guidance, or empower them to discover their own strength and ability to survive what life throws at them. It's my commitment to leaving something behind when I, too, leave this life.