What might have been

Antecedents here and here.

I can well imagine the conversation which took place behind closed doors after I left my interview at Wake Forest University.

“I don’t care what you want,” the chairman must have said. “I want him.”

“We don’t need another assistant prof,” said my would-be boss. “I need a fellow. A FELL-OW.”

“You don’t understand. He’s the future!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But it’s my fantasy and I’ll put whatever words I want into the chairman’s mouth.)

“Then you find a place for him in the department, but I don’t want him.”

So the chairman, hoping to find some sort of niche for me at Wake Forest, sent my CV to one of his cancer research buddies — Frank Torti, a guy who just happened to have been on my thesis advisory committee at Stanford.

My CV hit Frank’s desk like a steaming hotcake on a breakfast platter. It cooled over the next four months, buried under reprints and grant proposals. But Frank found it eventually.

Remember (not that I expect you to remember, since few of you parse my past the way I do): I’d been burned back at my department, I was itching for a change, but my wife had a baby on the way. Yeah, I knew Wake Forest’s laryngologist wanted a fellow, but I had just completed four years of undergraduate work, seven years of medical/graduate school, and five years of internship/residency. I wanted a damned job. I didn’t want to be a glorified student.

Hmm. Rather short-sighted of me. I think I would have made a great laryngologist.

But can you blame me for wanting to get on with my life? For not wanting to become a fellow, thereby accepting half of what was already a paltry assistant prof’s starting salary? Ultimately, with my family foremost in mind, I picked the job that had the best pay and benefits — but not before I had another crack at Wake Forest.

Cleaning off his desk a few months later, Frank found my CV, cried, “Hey! I know this guy!” and called the chairman. The chairman called me, told me, We want you, and soon afterwards Karen and I were on a plane to North Carolina.

I liked Frank. Still do. Frank liked me. Frank would have made an amazing research mentor, far better than anyone I’d ever worked with in Larry’s lab. If ever I had a chance to succeed in research, this was it.

And it all seemed so inevitable. One of my thesis committee members pulls my CV out of the air and calls me back to Wake Forest — how weird is that? Cancer research, even. And my PhD was in Cancer Biology. The Fates were stacking the deck.

Once there, the chairman dropped a bombshell on me. I would be jointly appointed in Frank’s department and the ENT department (that’s good), and the ENT department wanted me to be their dysphagia expert (that’s bad). Nowadays, I wouldn’t have minded being “the swallowing guy,” but at the time, dysphagia seemed like the most boring turf in my field. Still, he seemed flexible on the topic, so this wasn’t exactly a deal-killer.

Trouble was, I had a case of nerves from how my department at USC had mishandled me. I wanted to know where all the money was coming from. Last thing I wanted was to move my family to Wake Forest and discover I would have to generate my salary through grants, or something similarly obnoxious. The chairman tried to reassure me, but try as he might, his numbers never added up. And he made no sense to me, either. I began to wonder about his sanity.

Could I live with a nutty chairman if it meant working with the ideal research mentor?

I turned them down and took an Assistant Prof position at University of Texas, a place with a cool chairman, great faculty, and awesome (mostly) residents. (That ‘mostly’ — why, there’s another story. Is it defamation of character if I tell stories about someone without using his name?) I took my dizzy mice with me, and spent the next two years hating my stinky mouse colony, hating that my NIH grants all got shot down, hating myself for being such a flop as a scientist.

Since childhood I had been thinking I would grow up to be a scientist. How could I not be a scientist? And yet it just wasn’t working out. Would it have worked out at Wake Forest?

Who knows, maybe I would have flopped in Frank’s lab, too. Maybe the Winston-Salem summers would have been every bit as cruel as the San Antonio summers, and after two years, Karen and I would have been looking greedily at headhunter offers from any place with a mean temperature under 100F.

But I keep thinking about Elizabeth Edwards, and about my friend with breast cancer, and about my mom who survived breast cancer, and about the fact I could (maybe) have been a REAL cancer researcher but I turned it down, and weren’t the Fates pushing me in that direction? I can’t feel too bad about a decision made with my family in mind, but . . . but I could have been a real cancer biologist.

This is one of the odder regrets in my life, I have to admit.

D.