I know you all have gathered here today to be entertained by another one of Jack's amazingly comedic blog posts, but alas this one will be dreadfully serious. Today, we sit here at our individual computers and contemplate the loss of Jack's greatest mentor and friend, Carol. On Monday March 20th, 2017, Carol resigned from her position at Dr. Lalani's office to have a better life somewhere else. Although I know that somewhere deep down she would love to still work in the field of medicine, the petty, verbal kerfuffles between the coworkers she oh so despised finally got the best of her. She couldn't take it anymore. Years of being underappreciated finally beat her down and won a long war of attrition. The conflict ultimately climaxed when she finally had an epiphany at the end of her vacation and decided that she would not be returning to work on Monday.
In many ways, Carol quitting her job made my life harder. On one hand, I lost my on-site mentor, but more importantly I lost a friend. On the other hand, I learned a lot from Carol's actions. She told me before she left that in America it doesn't really matter how long you have worked somewhere or how good you are at your job, because if you do not have the proper credentials (i.e. college degrees) then you will not go very far in life. I think that this is a very important lesson to learn especially for people in high school, because you always hear about how important college is but not usually from someone who actually wishes that they had gone to school for longer. So, in the end, am I upset that Carol left? In the same way that you are upset when your dog is terminally ill and in pain and you have to put him/her down. You wish you did not have to live through the whole situation, but it's for the best. I know that Carol will be in a better place. She told me that her husband is some master tennis court builder or something so she is gonna try to get in on some of that action.
So since Carol was in-charge of everything I was working on in the office, I didn't get the opportunity to come in this week, but I'm working on being able to shadow a physician's assistant named Heather for the remaining 3 weeks which would be awesome. I would get to do more hands on stuff and see if interacting with patients is something that I would like to do as a part of my future profession. Instead of going in this week, I continued to do research on enzymes and their processes in the body. Apparently there are some medications like Humira which are not metabolized by the cytochrome p450 enzymes so they are just not tested for in the PGX study. I thought this was interesting, because it shows a shortcoming of the experiment.
Anyways, I just hope Heather is as much of a bro as Carol was. I hope to see you all next week with some interesting stories! LONG. LIVE. C@ROL.
