A reason to be grateful

I feel like I should knock on wood before I say this but it is the season for gratitude and so here I go: I love what I do.  I don't always love my job and there are certainly days that playing hookie and going to the beach sounds uhh-mazing but at the end of the day, I love what I my job lets me do.  I fell blindly into it over four years ago, just short of kicking and screaming, yet it seems to have fallen on the "disproportionately fortuitous accidents" life list.  The people that I have met, the opportunities that I've been given and the things that I've learned have exceeded every expectation that I had when I got here. 

It's not your average job (and by average, I mean one the people tell you about when you're in school: lawyer, doctor, teacher etc.)  and there's nothing in my education or life before coming here that would logically lead to this job, so I shouldn't be surprised when people really don't know what I do. I certainly didn't know what it was all about even when I took the job, and yet I am surprised.  I am surprised that people so close to me, who know so much about me, don't know or understand this part of my life that is so important and such a huge part of who I am.  The only explanation that I can think of for this is that I haven't told them.  I don't know where along the way I decided that my vague "clinical research" answer to the question of what do do would result in people understanding what I do each day but I guess I did. I also don't often blog about it very often, partially because there's a lot of confidentiality issues to be careful of and mostly because while getting fired for her blog worked out pretty well for Dooce, I suspect that it might not be quite so propitious for me.

Still, if I want people to know what I do and (more importantly) why it's important to me, I'm going to have to start talking / typing.  While getting fired isn't on my list of things to do, I think the following story is  relatively safe and, at least to me, speaks to the heart of what I do.  Seems like a good a place as any to start. 


 .....

I was standing in a patient room the other day with one of my favorite attending physicians (since our office has already nicknamed him thus, we shall call him Pinky) and the patient asked him why he got into the research side of cancer treatment.  His answer:

"I think how we treat these diseases is barbaric and I wanted to find a better way."

Now, that's NOT why I got into this area (I  really just needed a job) but it IS why I've stayed.  

Since I took this job, I've heard many times over, from people both close to me and not so close at all, that they disapprove of clinical research.  They disapprove of the pharmaceutical companies and somehow by association, the role that I play in helping them to develop their drugs.  I've been told that what I do it paramount to torturing people, that these companies hold the cures for cancer in the labs but don't use them because there's no money in a cure.  I've been told that clinical research is "crap."  I respectfully disagree. 

While I can't speak for the huge pharmaceutical conglomerates and the thousands upon thousands of people they employ,  I can say that the people that I've met: the physicians heading the trials, the study teams who put together the thousands of little pieces necessary to make a large scale trial run efficiently and meaningfully, the coordinators who pull it all together at the patient level and the patients who so generously enroll, we're all here in the hopes of finding a better way. And we're not doing it by turning our Facebook pictures pink, green or orange for a day.  We're not spamming our friends and family with chain emails about how many lives cancer took last year and isn't a shame. We show up every day and we work. We work on some exciting things, we work on many mundane things, we work on ideas made reality by people  far smarter than ourselves.   I'm not a doctor and I'm not a nurse but my piece of the puzzle is important, it has value and it's worth doing.

So as I stood in this patients room listening to Pinky all I could think was "yeah...yeah, that IS what I'm a part of and I'm proud of it dammit!"

How cool is it that I get to do this?  That I get to be part of finding the better way?  Damn cool and damn lucky if I can say so myself. :-)