I’ve learned that success to me means little without purpose, and my efforts gain value when they contribute to something bigger than myself.
I was only seven years old when my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer. I didn’t really understand what it was or why it couldn’t be cured. The curiosity of why it was getting worse, then better, later worse again, infatuated me as a child—it made my sadness translate into confusion and then into anger.
I was eight years old when she passed away. Even though I was too young to know at the time, I felt an overwhelming sense of desperation trying to find the answer for myself and my family because it didn’t sit right with me that we lost her after she had fought this battle so hard and for so long.
The following year, my elementary school teacher tasked my class with creating a “genius hour” presentation, which meant making a presentation about something we were passionate about and that would spark a ten-year-old’s interest as well as satisfy my teacher, who was just hoping we would be able to pull together a presentation that was at least somewhat understandable.
Fuelled by my emotions and my unanswered questions about my grandma, I walked up to the front of class all prepared to present. “Is there a cure for Cancer?” I wasn’t going off any background knowledge—the most we had learned in our generic science classes consisted of food chains, or solids, liquids and gases.
At the time, I was grasping for anything to ease the pain of losing someone so kind-hearted and full of life. My grandmother embodied health and compassion in the strongest form. She was active, and she took the health of herself and those close to her so seriously that it was inspiring. I used to watch her run in charity races, cheering from the sidelines and thinking, “Wow, I want to be just like her.”
She also had a gift for making every holiday feel magical. I try to carry her spirit with me in everything I do, but there isn’t a single holiday dinner where her absence isn’t felt. She mattered so deeply to me, and I was convinced that this rare opportunity to present whatever I wanted to would fill that void.
Now that 13 years have passed, my yearning to understand science and its unanswered questions has been the forefront of my passion. When I began applying to university, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, as the world felt like my oyster. But I knew my passion laid in research and uncovering truths within a sea of scientific ambiguity.
I had an itch to leave my comfortable town of Whitby, Ontario and move to the coastal city of Victoria, British Columbia. A place that seemed full of possibility where I could hopefully adhere to my calling of research, in whatever specialty I gravitated to. To my dismay, I had to return home to Ontario, only after four weeks of being away.
What felt like defeat or failure was really just redirection. A lesson that one can go through numerous times in their career and everyday life. I just felt helpless at the time and didn’t know what to do. All I was certain about was that I wanted to keep learning. I still had the same motivations to do biological research; I just needed to find some other place to do it.
I could’ve taken the year off after exams had finished, but I didn’t want to. That led me to Queen’s. I had to wait until the next year to fully transfer, so I enrolled through a Letter of Permission in the online undergraduate health sciences program. It was more specific than my initial program, biology, but it was still relevant to my interests and kept me in the classroom.
I began loving what I was learning again, and where I was learning it. It was the reset I needed. I now see this relocation as the sign that returned me to my original inspiration of studying cancer. I was especially excited about the research lab opportunities that Queen’s had to offer. That’s what I wanted to immerse myself in the most, as that’s how I would find my niche through hands-on learning in a real scientific environment—I couldn’t have been more ecstatic.
It was a strenuous process. It seemed like everyone was trying for lab assistant positions, but what I chose to emphasize in my applications was that I couldn’t stay a bystander while lives were being threatened or taken away. I deeply care to help advance a future where lives are no longer defined by cancer.
Within a year of when I first applied to cancer research positions, five family members and close friends have been diagnosed with cancer, all with various types and stages. The deterioration that I’ve witnessed over the last 12 months has been nothing short of terrible.
My genuine concern waivered into an incentive to work hard and immerse myself in pathology, microbiology and immunology. The severity of the disease coincides with its complexity.
Cancer’s a puzzle that’s ever so interesting to me, and my motivation’s credited to my corresponding fear that anyone in my life can be affected at any time. I wanted to conduct this type of research because cancer has taken too much from people I love. Seeing what they’ve gone through fuels my drive to understand the disease.
Tags
Cancer Research, grief, Postscript
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