Good Strong Arm

I think the next month is fairly crucial for determining the trajectory of my career, and that is such a weird thing to think. Just sitting, waiting for decisions on big paper and big grant. Getting one would be incredible, getting both would be phenomenal. The overwhelming likelihood is that I get neither.

Just waiting, waiting, waiting.

I have no clue when it is appropriate to start calling myself a scientist. There’s the medical degree, which I guess makes me an applied scientist of sorts, then there’s the PhD with a few publications, which I guess made me a grad student for a bit, then there’s the clinical postdoc fellowship during which I’ve done very little except write and receive rejection emails so far.

We sent one manuscript to a huge journal and they did not even think twice before rejecting it, didn’t even send it out to review. Sent it to the second-biggest journal in our field, and holy shit it feels good that they sent it back for major revision. First reviewer thinks it has legs, second reviewer thinks it stinks. That’s okay, because we think we have everything Reviewer 2 needs to be convinced. I cannot express how much of a boost to my career it would be if we manage to drag the thing to publication.

I wrote two grants in the second half of last year. The first one I thought was pretty good, but was rejected, and very irritatingly the panel told us that they were too busy to give feedback. That’s so useless, it doesn’t even tell me if I did anything wrong. The second one takes ages to report, and I’ve spent ages thinking it was rubbish and that I never wanted to read it again after submission, but I got bored and read it again today which gave me a bit of hope that we might get it. Again, it would open so many doors if I got that one.

But until I get a postdoctoral publication or a postdoctoral grant am I really a scientist? Or just some chancer who doesn’t spend enough time in either the hospital or the lab? Don’t know. I’m keen for an answer either way.

J came back from seeing one of our friends with a message that she’d said her husband, my good friend T, was struggling and would appreciate a call. He’s a newish dad like me, and I guess there’s always that criticism that men don’t talk about their feelings to each other enough, don’t reach out to each other enough, so one of us could be drowning and nobody would ever know.

I called him last week and we had a fairly light talk. He told me he’d been having a bit of a rough time and thanked me for calling, but we didn’t really go into detail at all.

Called him again yesterday and it turns out that he’s separated from his wife.

He’d gone through a really dark period where he felt like he wasn’t connecting with his son, and he felt like he was leaving home in the dark, going out to have a shit time at work, then returning in the dark to the baby that had been crying in the morning when he left. It sounded like he’d absented himself from both his marriage and from fatherhood as a reaction to how he felt, and his wife just didn’t have the bandwidth to look after both her husband and her son.

Absolute bombshell. I’m not sure I’d ever looked around our group and thought about it, but if I had I wouldn’t have suspected them.

He’s definitely in a better place now, and has come to absolutely love his son, but you know what it’s like in that early stage, he said to me.

I made some understanding noises, but I don’t think I recognised what he was describing (which, to be honest, sounded very much like men’s postnatal depression). Little I has brought nothing but joy to my life since the day he was born and every single day, no matter how frustrating, has been a miracle. I cannot even imagine how dark a place you’d need to sink into to feel how T felt, and even less having the courage to admit it. What a guy.

I don’t know that I’d have avoided having as rough a time if I hadn’t managed to secure the fellowship I currently have. It cuts my workload right down, I can work half my week flexibly if I need to. I remember my dad being frustrated at not being able to spend as much time with us as he wanted because of postgraduate things he had to do with his job: I had resolved to get all of my postgrad qualifications out of the way before my first kid was born, and he arrived literally as I finished my doctorate.

Every day I live for the moment when he looks at me and smiles when I get home. It breaks my heart that T might have gone for even a second not being able to feel that.