MAMA DON'T LET YOUR BABY GROW UP TO BE A CHEMIST....

One thing my parents ALWAYS stressed was that I had to have a career that would give medical insurance, and that I would have to find a job that I could at least pay for my medication.  Now, this is an interesting way to grow up.  I was always very attracted to creative writing. Even when I was my daughters age I had a wild imagination and would create stories.  My mother even saved the stories I wrote in 1st grade. I can remember going to one of my creative writing professors for a recommendation. He was very disappointed that it wasn't for a master's in creative writing.  I could tell a story, I think it came from my dad.  He could tell incredible stories.  I had an incredible life.  Kidney transplant, crazy family, I always had great writing material. So,  I did a double major:  creative writing and chemistry and had great friends that would look over my stories for grammar and spelling mistakes.  But, the one thing I remember is my mother telling me that creative writing was a hobby and I would never be able to afford my medications with a MFA degree.  Of course to this day the I think about how my life may have been different if I didn't have to pay for my medical insurance.  Now, I know Obamacare is a major issue right now, but heck, we are one of the only places that I feel don't take care of our people.  I mean all of Europe you have medical and an education.  I watched SICKO and cried.  I thought, wow, my life would have been so much different if I had grown up in Europe with medical care.  I can remember my dad saying that he could never start a company on his own because he had to pay for my medical insurance.  My husband now says the same thing.  That is one reason I LOVED BOSTON.  In MA insurance companies cannot deny you.  It is great.  I love it.  GA is a different story and I am sure they are going to fight Obamacare until the end.  But, hey--I will never be denied insurance again.  It is a sense of freedom that I cannot explain.

 
At first I thought I would become a doctor.  I would be a doctor and help people.  Then I realized that the majority of the people out there are nuts and probably would not take their medicine and that would just frustrate me.  So I went into chemistry. I had glorious aspirations, just like any other chemist of finding a drug that would help or cure cancer or the ultimate transplant drug.  Well, I worked for about 8 years in chemistry and all the dreams were ruined.  One thing that was difficult was the fact that there was all men in the industry.  For four years I worked at a small biotech in San Diego where I was the only women out of 24 men.  Then it was the foreign men.  They have their own ideas about women.  And then there was the overgrown Mormon who lived with his mother that grabbed me in a fight!  Yes, it was so nice to work in chemistry.  I would just focus on my work, and watch the men get raises. I always thought it was one place that the women's movement never seem to have gotten too.    But, the worst part was the skin cancer.  It started about a year after I started working.  I thought it was a wort, or a sore that won't go away.  It was basil or squamous skin cancer.  And little by little my fingers and hands would be cut up and the cancer would "be gone."  It never really has had been that way.  It has been 10 years since I have worked in a lab and I still have this problem.  Of course the main reason behind the skin cancer was the fact that I was immune suppressed for so many years of my life.  In fact, it is probably the major reason.  But just Tuesday, as I spent all day at the doctors office getting MOH's and coming out with a stitches in my arm, and two skin grafts on my middle finger, I thought just maybe I should have gone into creative writing.