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- Kat: My dad was just--
He was kind of like my superhero.
When I was a little kid,
I'd like always said that I was going to be a doctor
''cause it's what my dad did.
We got along very well.
We were able to like have conversations
that flowed really easily
because we just like thought about things the same way.
When I was 11,
um, just before I turned 12,
my dad had the flu. [exhales]
He had the flu and he went to the hospital eventually
'cause he'd had it for like two weeks.
When he came back, he, like, he was acting kind of weird.
And I literally said to him, I was like, "What?!
Like, it's not like you have cancer or something."
Like, I really did.
And um, he sat us down, me and my brother,
and he was like, "Guys, this is going to be hard."
So, my like middle school years weren't exactly normal.
I mean, it's really hard to be
like sitting there reading To Kill a Mockingbird
while like you're looking at the clock,
knowing your dad is at a chemo appointment, and you're like,
"Okay, like how do I, like,
"talk to these girls about going to the mall after school?
Like, I can't do that."
I spent a lot of time just researching.
Like, first I was told it was pancreatic cancer
and I was like, "Okay," and I Googled that.
I just, I did everything I could to know everything I could.
But after he started going in
for like chemo treatments and stuff
and it became clearer that like,
he was not going to survive this.
He went into in-home hospice,
at the end of my seventh-grade year.
I ended up taking care of him a lot.
I was a 12-year-old girl that knew exactly how
to best position my arm so that a 6'2" full-grown man
could put as much weight as possible on me
to walk up the stairs.
His funeral was a couple of weeks later.
And I spoke at my dad's memorial.
And I stood up there with a box of his ashes
and I don't really remember what I said
other than,
"My dad was way too much to fit into this little box."
Um, and that's, that's where everything started.
Um, there were a lot of doctors in the audience
because my dad worked at the hospital,
and one of them asked for me to speak at an event.
And I was like, "Okay,
"I don't know what I'm going to talk about,
so I'm just going to, like, say what I think."
And I was like, "Well, you're going to notice
"that I'm the only person that will stand up here tonight
"who isn't wearing a lab coat.
"I am not a doctor, but I can tell you what it looks like
"when a chemo patient is trying to walk up the stairs,
and that's why I'm up here."
And, like, I continued my talk like that.
Cancer always felt like this big dark cloud over my head,
and, like, just completely unbeatable.
But then, my school, they would take field trips
into the labs doing cancer research.
And we would get to see all of the cool like research stuff
and the lasers and like the fun science-y things.
And they showed me a mouse pancreas with a real tumor on it
and I held it in my hands.
And I was like, "This is what killed my dad.
This, right here."
And like, it wasn't that big dark cloud anymore.
It was actually a thing that I was holding in my hands.
And I was like, "This is doable."
So then, I would talk at my school.
I would go around classrooms
and I was at every Race for Research, Pedal for Pancreas,
and all of the marches and all of the events.
And eventually, I got around to announcing some grants
for the UW's Carbone Cancer Center.
And I ended up emailing one of the nominees
and asking if he had any opportunities
in his lab during the summer.
I kind of took that initiative.
I worked there for about eight weeks.
That felt really good for me to be able
to stand there and do that.
'Cause for so long I had been saying,
"I'm not wearing a lab coat."
But now, I was wearing a lab coat,
and I still had all of my prior experiences,
but I was understanding the medicine behind it.
And so, like, I'm hoping to continue doing that.
I want to work tentatively in pediatric oncology
when I'm older.
I really, I want to be able to look at a patient
and when I tell them
that they need to go to their chemo appointment,
I want them to know,
""I know how hard it will be when you go home."
And I don't want someone else's sister
to be sitting in her literacy class in eighth grade,
staring at the clock,
while someone she loves is in a chemo appointment.
Like, I want them to know that I'll be right there.
So like, I want to be that doctor.
Nothing feels better
than to actually make a difference
in the thing that's so problematic for you.
Like, you can make the difference that you want to see.
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