Nothing I Ever Learn...
Fri., February 8, 10:27 AM
You hear me say it all the time: nothing you ever learn is wasted. And I don’t just mean what my seventh grade geography teacher told us. “You might be on a quiz show some day…” I mean that, if your mind is open to learning new things and using them, it doesn’t matter how or where you learned it; you will make use of it.
The prime example I used to explain to my children concerned a job I held before I was married. I was working in the public affairs office of a large and famous cancer center, and the first press release I typed for them — I didn’t create it, of course — concerned an experimental drug called L-asparaginase. It would take me some time to realize that it was being announced because they wanted physicians to refer appropriate patients to the program; unfortunately, many of the calls I took were from patients grasping for straws.
In any case, I learned the name and how to spell and pronounce it, and I could deal with some of the queries we got from science editors. I went on to other tasks and eventually left that job. I remembered L-asparaginase whenever I read something about it, but that was it.
Fast forward: I got married, left the work force to have babies, and then started working again. No one cared about my past record, and I signed up with the old Kelly Girls, at minimum pay. They sent me to the Yale College of Pharmacy, where I typed for various projects, including one about… L-asparaginase. I mentioned to one of the researchers that I had typed about the drug before, and she told me that it had been proven effective in certain cases. What they were doing was trying to ascertain just what chemical properties made it work. I had learned something, and it wasn’t wasted.
Fast forward again: after some fifteen years at “real jobs,” I was once again temping, this time directly for Yale University and its School of Medicine. This particular assignment was transcription of interviews conducted by graduate students in psychology. Not all of the students were good at it; some of them didn’t know how to use the tape recorder. But with the help of some pre-written questions, they managed to elicit some information that I never thought I would use.
These days I am reminded of the women who were caring for relatives with some sort of senior dementia. Mostly it was adult daughters, but one woman was caring for her sister, and at least one was caring for her spouse. That was the one that impressed me most.
She was a woman who had had a long, satisfying career as a teacher when she decided to marry. She took early retirement in order to spend time with him, to participate in activities they both enjoyed, and especially to travel. The first sign she had of his problem was when they were on a trip and he couldn’t remember where they had been the day before.
She cut the trip short in order to get him home to his personal physician, but his condition deteriorated rapidly. At the time of the interview, she still had him at home — a full-time job. She was cutting up his food for him because he couldn’t be trusted with a knife. (He would cut the napkins.) She had removed or replaced all the knobs on drawers to keep him from opening them (and emptying them). Most of the time she stayed at home with him because it was so hard to find an attendant who could care for him.
Y’know, once again I know that my own situation could be a helluva lot worse. I was able to continue working until I couldn’t see. One of the reasons I stayed with Bosslawyer was that I was five minutes from home, and if I had to work more than five hours, I could always drive over and at least make sure Husband was still breathing. I retired about sixteen months before his last emergency. I believe I have a guardian angel.
