Thread by @jonc101x

When any given day in academic medicine can feel like a thankless grind on a relentless hamster wheel, it's worth having gratitude for any and all support along the way. 🧵(Image: Belle Kim, Zachary Elgar, and A Prolific Source, 2015)

As a classical overachiever, it's typical to project a public persona of infallibility and effortless success.

Inspired by "CV of failures," I ironically find it more inspiring to see that success is often only achieved in the face of frequent setbacks and disappointments.
sciencealert.com/why-creating-a…

Grateful for @DorisDukeFdn and @StanfordMed institutional support to even acknowledge the context of challenges while striving to achieve results for early career scientists faced with caregiving responsibilities amidst the pandemic.
seedfunding.stanford.edu/opportunities/…

When I met the other awardees from the last cycle, I saw that all of others were ambitious woman scientists, likely with young children at home.
It perhaps seemed odd then, what I was doing there?

Sharing below the essay I wrote as part of my application. May it offer a helpful perspective to others trying their best to do some good in the world, grinding away through life marathons. despair.com/products/quali…

"While I was making excellent progress in my clinical informatics research program as a new junior faculty, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak disrupted that momentum in large part due to increased caregiving responsibilities for both my school age children and elderly parents.

As the pandemic broke over two years ago, I was glad and prepared to jump into the front lines against a menacing societal threat as a practicing hospital physician.

I have continued clinical care even during peak surges in holiday weeks, responding to hospital calls for assistance to keep up with the needs of our patients.

What I was NOT prepared for was to effectively become a homeschool teacher for my 5 and 9 year old children. With my wife a full-time physician-scientist in the hospital herself, no family in the area, and all schools and daycare shut down, all research time had to move in home.

Between March to October 2020, I supervised my children every day, prodding them to engage in “Zoom school” and preparing lunch. Of course, “Zoom kindergarten” was ludicrous and required constant support for 5 hours a day, making continued work extremely inefficient.

Many of my colleagues and collaborators can attest to the not uncommon appearance of a then 6 year old enjoying running through the house naked in the background of my research Zoom calls.

Our institution’s offers for additional childcare credits through agency services was well appreciated and intended, but unfortunately not necessarily effective. The very nature of a pandemic surge is that all infrastructure breaks down.

Thus, even when I had booked extra home daycare services for a weekend where I was on service in the middle of the Omicron surge (and my wife was gone for a conference), the daycare service canceled on us the day before.

We were thus pressed for the first time to leave a 7 and 11 year old home alone, while I frantically completed morning rounds in the hospital before returning home to provide childcare. Luckily, the house was not burned down nor any other major disasters while I was gone.

On Christmas Eve of 2020, I received a call from my widowed mother living in the Los Angeles area. I offered “Merry Christmas,” but she was tearful, revealing that she had just gotten COVID-19.

This was especially frustrating as we were mere weeks away from vaccine availability, and it was still not practical for anyone to travel.

While she made it through to New Year’s, she strangely became progressively debilitated. She called me from an emergency department visit where a scan found that she now also had a recurrence of metastatic cancer that was not treatable given how debilitated she had become.

Through January 2021, I finally got the first course of vaccinations (while also completing *another* R01 grant submission), and spent every other week traveling to LA, managing months of unopened mail and unpaid bills, and arranging medical, home hospice and caregiver support.

I was still attempting to conduct research meetings in LA via Zoom, even as I had to provide direct medical supervision and counseling as family members hid my mother’s morphine, believing it to be “poison” while she moaned in pain just days away from her death in March 2021.

The loss of a beloved and lifelong advocate parent is of course tragic, but natural and inevitable. What I was not prepared for was months of toil in the aftermath as I became the executor to settle her affairs with many ugly business and personal issues left up in the air.

This likely disrupted my research productivity more than any other challenge, as I had to dedicate many daytime business hours calling funeral arrangers, accountants, banks, insurance companies, real estate agents, lawyers, police, and even private investigators.

A couple months after my mother’s death, I was invited as a keynote speaker at the @MayoClinic @hongfangliu @jhalamka Artificial Intelligence Symposium. It was refreshing there to lead a discussion about my optimistic hopes to advance the science of medicine and improve lives.

Despite all of the challenges during the pandemic, I strove to remain as effective and productive as I could towards serving our larger mission in medical research.

Respectively, I continued to support a vibrant team of trainees and collaborators towards publications in venues ranging from JAMA, JAMA Network Open, JAMIA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Nature Digital Medicine, and The Lancet.

While I was able to attract R56 bridge funding from the @NLM_NIH, the @MooreFound, and an @NSF sponsored industry collaboration among others, my progress and enthusiasm for sustaining a demanding physician-scientist career is not what it could be with additional support."

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