Good Strong Arm

Long time since last post: now honorary consultant (though no uni tenure), new baby, two-year research grant application just submitted. Writing for my life: want to go for a second one this year.

Father of two! Clinical academic! Feel good about where I am in life. New baby is an absolute wonder, and first baby loves him so much, which melts our hearts. Still feel like current research projects (that I’m research associate on, rather than leading) will never be finished. Clinical is going without incident and is enjoyable, for now at least.

Itchy feet still: if someone offered me a clinical academic job in Canada I would lobby very very hard to go for it.

Unsuccessful application. Gutting, but enough time to go again. Just enough time with these things that between stages of the process you have enough time to dream and imagine what things would be like if it all came together, and this would genuinely have changed my life.

Still, learned lots from the process, and it’s still coming off the pitch being applauded by travelling fans after a tough match against much larger opposition.

Back to the training ground.

Shortlisted and invited for interview! Wow.

Interviews in October, which feels like ages away, but with a foot in the door I should leave nothing to chance. The Big Boss sounds like he’s keen to sort some mock interviews for me, but I just hope I manage to get myself in good enough shape that even if I don’t get it, I feel like I gave it a damn good go.

Trying not to think too much about what it would be like if I got it (life-changing). It would be absolutely incredible to get.

I remember when we were exhilarated when the baby started to use his hands; we would convince ourselves that obviously he meant to reach out and touch one of the toys dangling from the mobile. Obviously, it was intentional and not just a random movement of his hand.

Now that he’s mobile, despite not being able to speak, he gives a clear sense of what he wants by how he moves around. He’ll walk a few steps before his balance gets the better of him, but he’ll pretty much walk indefinitely if you hold his hand. Last night after dinner, he demonstrated how well he’d been indoctrinated by our bedtime routine: holding J’s hand he walked to his bookcase, considered a book, then turned, walked out of the living room, crawled up the stairs, then into the bathroom and pretty much asked us to run him a bath. What an utter joy he is to look after.

Still no decision on the big fellowship. Shortlisting is “July”, they say, and we’re almost done with July and I’ve had no rejection email. I’ll take that as a good sign.

Doing okay. Grant application deadline approaching. Put my heart and soul into this one, genuinely think it’s really good. Every time I thought of how likely they are to just reject it made me just want to stop and pack it in. It’s almost done though. Just waiting for other people’s bits. They better not let me down.

It would be life changing to get it.

Baby doing phenomenally, what a guy. Can’t believe the time has flown like this.

Holiday soon. We need it.

I tell everyone that I’m nicely settled in our current city, and I am. Great location, wonderful house, nice social network, comfortable cost of living. Heading away on a research visit today, though, and flying over London landmarks made me so homesick, listening to the guys in the seat behind me misidentify football grounds. Absolute pipe dream to transfer the same standard of living to the capital, though one can but dream.

Started the week by falling down the stairs, coming to the end of it having had a meeting that is likely to be the most consequential of my career so far. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but my mentor is delightfully bonkers and will prove to be immensely helpful if he’s not all talk, and I’ve got no reason to believe he’s all talk. Seems like the kind of person that gets stuff done. Let’s see where this goes.

Identity is a weird thing. I guess I’m talking professionally here. I know what my clinical specialty is because I have a big badge that says my job title and I do work that pertains to a particular body organ. But subspecialty? I think I should be the kind of person who develops a subspecialty interest, but when does that happen? Here we don’t often get credential badges certifying our subspecialty interest. Do I just have to do loads of clinics in that specialty? I’ve done nowhere near enough of the subspecialty I want to be a subspecialist in.

How about academically? My doctoral thesis was a mishmash of stuff that I billed as "cellular and molecular medicine", but there was a bit of immunology in there, a bit of (really basic) systems biology. My appraisal is coming up soon and I’ve billed what I want to do as "computational immunology" but at the moment I only have funding for my salary and absolutely nobody has given me money to do any "computational immunology" although that’s what I want to do. Even if they did, when do I become a "computational immunologist"? When my first paper from that grant is out? When I have access to the funds? Am I even a "scientist" now? It’s taken months for me to be comfortable with calling myself a postdoc.

Just some fucking guy.

Okay, wow, the paper has been accepted by the big journal. The editors negotiated us down to reformatting it into a research letter before they sent it out for review, so my first instinct is to tell myself to relax because it’s not a full article, just a research letter, but the way my PI is reacting tells me that it’s actually a big deal, and he’s not the kind of person to make a big deal of things. I’ll probably be completely unproductive and see if it’s the kind of thing that puts me in a good position for an early career fellowship.

Even if it is, there is still the nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me that the paper doesn’t contain good enough science that I could justify the kind of science I’d want to do in a fellowship. I’m also struggling to convince myself that someone won’t pop out of the woodwork and find some fatal flaw in the paper that the reviewers failed to see, and look, what a fucking fraud I am, trying to get away with publishing this nonsense.

K was one of the postdocs in the lab when I started my PhD and I remember when I told her the journal I was planning to send the paper to, she gave me encouragement in a way that felt a bit patronising, like, oh, you sweet summer child. I’d been a co-author on a paper of hers that she’d had rejected from the same journal so maybe it was coloured by that, but it did feel like there was an undertone of if I can’t get a paper in there, then you certainly won’t be able to. I think I deserve to gloat, but it’s not my style, partly because it’s such a struggle to truly believe I deserve it.

My current postdoc position is externally funded, which means my clinical work is completely gratis to my clinical department. With that in mind, I had a slightly odd conversation with H, my clinical training programme director, where she said she couldn’t guarantee the location of my clinical placement for the next academic year. Given that everything I do, research or clinical, is a gift to her clinical department, why would she want me to feel like she’d have to send me elsewhere? The only thing I can think of is that she doesn’t want me to get too comfortable; she doesn’t want me to feel like I can develop a feeling of security just because I do a bit of science, no way we’ll let this Billy Big Bollocks feel like he’s bigger than the club. It’s obviously ridiculous that that’s easier than giving me every single bit of support possible, but there you go. I don’t resent clinical work at all, but the bureaucracy of clinical training is designed to show you that the sky is the limit but the leash is short, and we can tug on it whenever we want to.

Celebrations in order, I suppose.

Been trying to get I to sleep through the night in his cot after months of co-sleeping. The prolonged howling even though we were just a metre or so further away was heartbreaking. Crying and babbling like he’s trying to tell us how much he hates us for doing it. He’s not normally a baby that cries for many reasons at all, so it was a particular heartstring tugger. That said, he slept well once he settled down, and made it through the night without a comfort feed. What a little trooper.

Due to have discussions about acting up as a consultant today. Did a procedure with one of the bosses yesterday that shook my confidence, though, didn’t manage to complete it without significant help, so it almost makes me feel like I don’t deserve to finish training and I definitely don’t deserve to pretend to be a consultant in a few months’ time. I don’t think something like that would normally shake me up this way, but maybe it’s the tiredness, I have no clue.