The Hits Keep On Coming

Last week the bad news keep coming and coming.

It started when I heard that my sister-in-law was very sick. She has been diagnosed with advanced cancer, that has spread to various parts of her body. She has always been such a strong person. I hope that her strength will guide her as she faces this latest challenge. We will be making a trip to visit her very soon.

On the same day I heard about my sister-in-law's health status, I received a call from one of my graduate students. She told me that she was taking a full-time job. She had just defended her thesis proposal a few weeks ago and I was hoping she would defend her thesis later this semester. While I know that taking a full-time job was not her first choice, unfortunately the graduate student health insurance is not great at UAB. She felt she had to have good health insurance given health issues she has. I couldn't tell her not to do this when I know finances have been a major source of stress for her. Not having a strong financial safety net can be very stressful, as I know from my own life. And, she'll make more in this job than she would starting with a PhD as an Assistant Professor. Even though I know she needs to do this, it is still sad. She works as an RA on one of my projects and the team is very close. We will all miss her working on the project and seeing her around the office. I am hopeful that she will finish her MA and also her PhD. She only has a few more classes for her PhD and then her dissertation. Her thesis is pretty far along, so I think she'll finish this pretty easily.

I told one of my grad students that I wondered what was going to be the 3rd piece of bad news, since they typically come in 3s. Well, a couple of days later, I heard that one of my cousins is in the hospital with a large brain tumor (the size of a baseball). The good news is that it doesn't appear to have spread and they hope they can remove it.

In addition to these things, some of you may have heard of Hurricane Irene which pounded the east coast of the US over the past few days. It came ashore near Cape Lookout, which is close to Atlantic Beach, NC. We're still waiting to hear about damage in Atlantic Beach (where we have a condo). Power was restored Sunday night and they began to let people back onto the beach. We hope that the damage was not severe to the community and to our condo. We feel for all the people up and down the east coast who have experienced the impacts of Irene!

I am hopeful that this week will not bring more 'hits' but rather some good news of some sort. As we look around us, we feel very lucky to have our health and our family.