Mom, do I have to???

So earlier this week, I attended the annual Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease meeting sponsored by ASM (American Society for Microbiology) and man, it was so interesting!!! For the first time, I took my daughter with me and she was "all good" with it until I told her she had to write a report and submit it to her science teacher, LOL!! Needless to say, I doubt she'll be attending any other meetings with me, LOL!! This time though, I made sure to have some fun too which I don't really do at meetings because I'm usually by myself. And I let my daughter talk me into getting a room on the 14th floor which meant I stayed away from the floor to ceiling windows because I have vertigo, LOL!!!

The keynote speaker was a Hispanic woman who happens to study Dengue, the virus I'd love to do research on too. She was so entertaining and obviously her research was very impressive!! And yeah, I was happy to see someone brown give the keynote lecture. Now no meeting synopsis from me would be complete if I didn't talk about the food and it was terrific! But I forgot just how wasted Scientist/Physicians are, but with an open bar of anything you can imagine, what do you expect, LOL??

Sometime soon, I have to present a topic from the meeting to the folks at my job and this is the first time this has been required at this job. My supervisor explained that I may get a little "hateration" from my colleagues because of the new changes and how happy I seem to be about them, bet hey reporting on what you learned at a meeting is what I've ALWAYS been required to do! And in typical 2 for 1 fashion, I'm also planning to do a class presentation on a similar topic to the one I'm presenting at my job, also on Dengue virus.

Anyway, all this infectious disease (ID) talk has me thinking and rethinking what I want to do before I start med school because more and more each day, I question what I'm currently doing. I was originally going to study Dengue infection in brain (love that neuroscience flava) as my primary project, but after consulting with my supervisor it was changed to traumatic brain injury in part to appease BullyPI. Thing is, I know for a fact that BullyPI wouldn't be impressed if I could $hit published papers in neurosceince, so I say why waste my time? Honestly, I really want to get back into ID because I think if I can't, I may change jobs I like it THAT much. It's the area I'd like to study if for some reason I never completed the MD and it's not coincidental that for my long term plan "B", this area of study is required for the part-time PhD in Biodefense.

So for now, I'm content to just roll with the punches, but I'll likely take at least one course/semester in Emerging Infectious Disease/Bioterrorism in the future, to complete the certificate program I started years ago. From there, who knows???