Next week I turn 41. And I just enrolled in Pre-Med as a junior. Technically I'm still 40 when I started this, so the name is staying. I have laid in bed at night for the last two weeks wondering what I am doing. So far, I'm doing it online, mostly to get pre-requisites out of the way. I have never done college level science classes. I have put this off for more than 20 years. I still feel a bit disjointed about it. It's almost surreal that I'm finally at the doorstep of medical school.
Part of me is wondering why I put it off for so many years. I know why.
I had seven kids.
I finished out my enlistment in the Air Force.
I moved a lot.
I met a lot of people and learned a lot of stuff.
I homeschooled 5 of the 7 kids.
I had to finally accept that there probably won't be more babies joining our family.
I discovered my son has a rare genetic disorder...that sucked up years trying to get that diagnosis.
I had to get my kids settled in public school when it became apparent that homeschooling is not the best setting for any of us.
I wanted Curtis to be settled in his career and feel like we finally got somewhere and weren't starving students.
I had to work up the courage to believe I could do this program.
There's a whole lot of living in between those sentences. While I stressed about the upcoming classes and what was going to be expected of me, and wold I have time to get all these assignments done and get decent grades on them, I was also finishing up Neuropsychological testing on three kids, orthodontist appointments for 4 kids, getting one son enrolled in a new high school, and allergy testing done on another son.
Two nights before my classes officially start I got emails from the teachers with their syllabuses and a link to a tutorial for the online classroom. It was confusing and different, but I've done these kinds of classes before so I just have to figure out this school's system. Got it. No panic attack yet. Then it got more confusing. Seminars, assignments, different parts of the assignments in different places. O.M.G. How am I going to remember all that?! LABS?! I didn't think I needed to do labs yet! Oh wait...wait...it's reading a lab report! I GOT THIS!!!! I have read so many of those from myself and my kids, and Curtis, it wasn't scary at all. Put.the.bag.down. Hyperventilating avoided.
Here is why I want to do this school. I was 13 years old and volunteering with the Red Cross in Germany. They let me work the summer in Pediatrics, where I checked vitals and helped give immunizations. On my lunch breaks I would run up to the Newborn Nursery (before they were secure floors like they are now) and drool at the window over the new babies. That's where my passion was. I loved the babies! I was up there so much the head nurse finally allowed me to come in for the last two weeks of summer and volunteer in the nursery. At 13 years old, I was watching live births, performing all the preparatory jobs for the new baby and mom, bathing them, giving glasses, and helping with daily care of the babies. I absolutely loved every single minute of it. I continued to volunteer every weekend after school started. I didn't care about my social life. I was hanging out with nurses and babies. BABIES!!
I thought after high school that I would go into nursing. Instead, I meandered around in day care and Elementary education. Later, I moved onto business management and accounting. It was fun, in an organized and quiet way, but not as fulfilling as I had been when I worked in the Newborn Nursery. I had two kids when I went for my Associates degree, 5 kids by the time I finished my Bachelor's degree, and I was no where near a school that I could have done nursing at in rural Nebraska. I worked for 14 months using my degree. Then I had another baby and then it was just easier to stay home.
For years Curtis and I talked about going to medical/nursing school. Never knowing if it was something we should do, or the timing wasn't right, or some other problem would pop up and more schooling just got put on the back burner. I had some people talk me out of it. Some people that pushed me towards it. It wasn't until the last year helped me figure out what I wanted to do.
I love the idea of nursing, but I wasn't sure I wanted to get my hands dirty. I read blogs, forums, talked to other medical professionals. One person told me this: You see people at their worst and at their best. It changes all the time. I wanted to be that brave soul that could say, "I've seen everything and it doesn't bother me", but really, I still feel like passing out when I watch surgical incisions and I'm overly sensitive to smells. Maybe there is a trick to getting over that, but I haven't learned what it is yet. I still have a hard time with poopy diapers on my own kids.
At the beginning of this year we took our oldest son into Neurology. Initially this was to get a consult about an old brain injury, and for more diagnostics. He had all kinds of problems, and the older he was getting, the harder they were getting to manage, and so here we sat, hoping for some answers. They measured his head, his arms, made a few comments, and took some blood. I didn't get any answers. They were thinking maybe Klinefelter's syndrome (a double X chromosome in boys). Negative. Fragile X? He had symptoms of Autism, maybe that was it? Negative. Then it came back that he had a chromosome duplication on the 22nd chromosome. There isn't a name. 22q11.2 Duplication is all we got. There was no more information on it except what they had printed off for me from the internet. They sent us to Genetics. They didn't have any other information for us either. He was 15 years old and we just now get this diagnosis? After years and years of me going to doctors asking and begging for answers. Vague at the best, misdiagnosis at the worst, and dismissed most of the time is what we ended up with. Later this year we got an official Autism diagnosis, and then Bipolar disorder diagnosis. Along with this came ADHD, pectus excavatum and Polland syndrome, possible cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, and some odd bone structure things. Lots of learning disabilities and processing problems. Lots of stress for a boy to deal with.
I'm excellent at research. I will research all kinds of stuff. Things like how to fix my dryer to the black midwives of the old south, from Lewis and Clark's expedition (fascinating stuff there), to how to move overseas. What ever question came up, I researched it. With all of my son's diagnosis, I researched everything I could that I could understand on it. And then someone mentioned Genetics to me. Why not become a genetics counselor? So I researched how to become a genetics counselor, and this is how I got to Pre Med's doorstep at almost age 41.
4 years of schooling. I can do this!!!
My first three classes: Anatomy and Physiology, Microbiology, and Research Methods for Health Sciences.
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