Tomorrow, I go back to school full-time.
At Wichita State. Majoring in Medical Technology. Will be a certified Medical Laboratory Scientist by the end of 2011.
And for now, I’m still at the Eagle for twenty hours a week.
Over a year ago, when I was on medical leave, high on Percocet but still so consumed by pain that I barely left the couch, I followed the details of one round of McClatchy layoffs. From friends at other papers, I learned of at least one web journalist layoff at a McClatchy paper, and it changed things.
I’d watched coworkers say goodbye while my team grew. We were at the cool kids’ table, we were supposed to be safe. We were going to save things, we were supposed to be safe. But we weren’t.
I had a job to go back to once I’d recovered from my surgery. But the what-ifs had started. What if I got laid off next time? (That didn’t happen.) What if they cut the team members who made my projects possible? (That did happen.) What if I stopped hearing from people who wanted to hire me away (that had already happened), leaving me few options if I ever wanted to leave Wichita for another journalist-programmer job?
I was a control freak without the control I had always wanted for myself, and I wasn’t happy.
A couple of weeks later, partly thanks to the drugs I was on to pull me out of my post-surgery funk, I started having a series of strange dreams. I have no expertise in dream interpretation, but what seemed obvious to me was that my brain was telling me, begging me, “I need to do something else, I need to think about something else, I need to churn on something completely else.”
It was the same impulse that left me journalism major half a decade earlier. Exhausted from so many semesters of science classes in high school and the first semester of college, I was desperate to chase something in another part of my brain. Not something trivial. Something important and fascinating. Something completely else.
And then a few weeks later, I noticed how much better my back felt now that it was supporting less weight. Sitting at a desk all day now that I was able to spend more time on my feet felt downright oppressive.
So take all of that and my thought process is:
- Beating cancer the first time was relatively easy. Next time would be much harder. I got a free pass that I cannot waste.
- My brain needs variety. Turning a nerdy hobby into a full-time job was, as I’d feared, not for me.
- I miss biology, and there are health-care-related jobs out there that will tickle my brain and use my particular talents.
- If dramatic career change is going to happen, this is an opportunity to pick something with job security and a better job market. Whatever I do, I want to be able to do it wherever Kyle and I might go, even if the economy is tanking.
- I cannot sit at a desk all day every day.
- There are so many reasons to make a change that I can’t spend any more time listening to excuses not to.
And so I set to investigating my options. I thought about pharmacy school, but it was a big commitment and, at for now, there’s no pharmacy school in Wichita. I thought about nursing, but bedpans. I looked at courses of study and prerequisites and tuition rates and salary ranges. I talked to people and other people and other people. I took a class to see if I could stand being an undergrad again. I filled out my FAFSA as early as I possibly could. I spent hours bouncing what-ifs off my parents and boyfriend. I crunched numbers. I suffered twelve brain-melting weeks of the worst online chemistry class ever.
And tomorrow, I go back to school, and I am going to get myself a job where I wear a lab coat and juggle jars of pee, and I am deliriously happy.
