Tomorrow it will be one week since I finally submitted my masters thesis. It will also be one year since the journey really started – that first night in Peckham sleeping in a sleeping bag on a rickety single bed, my one bag of belongings spread out on the floor around me; the first walk through Burgess Park to Camberwell Road, buying crazy pink leggings at the East Street Market; the first time I caught the 63 bus to King’s Cross and was dismayed at how long it took; a first night out with cider in the White Horse; my first attempt at cooking plantains. Then those first-day-of-school nerves, deciding what to wear, worrying that everyone else seems to know each other already, then meeting Phil (my first fellow microbiologist!), then Catherine, Adam, Mark, Naomi, Chantelle, Nenna and all the others, biology-nerd jokes (“I wish that I was DNA helicase…”), free sandwiches.
Last September, I didn’t know what “molecular biology” was, never mind “genomics”, “quorum sensing”, “slip-strand miss-pairing”, “sub-genomic RNA” (actually still don’t know what that last one means). I hadn’t done an essay-based exam since school. I wasn’t used to learning by lectures. I had never done a gram stain, or a catalase test, or streaked a plate for single colonies, or put up a peptone water. It is fair to say that I was pretty far out of my comfort zone. I didn’t tell many people at the time, but during that first term I went to see my personal tutor to ask about whether I could consider changing onto one of the public health courses- not because I didn’t want to do microbiology, but because I felt that there was a very real possibility that I wouldn’t pass my exams. I felt that I was slipping behind already. He calmly told me to wait until the after the mid-term exams before making any major life decisions. Wise words. Bit by bit, microbiology became a bit less scary, then it even started to seem like quite good fun – the moustache sketches and blue-tac dinosaur models that we would find on our lab bench, the endless jokes about “very small rods”, foozball tournaments during “incubation periods”, revision sessions with endless quantities of pizza and Doritos.
I forgave Peckham for the long commute, and began to fall in love with London. I learned to love the buses. My commute, which took me first on a morning walk past the Burgess Park duck pond, then over Waterloo bridge on the 168 bus, could make me smile no matter how stressed out I was. People seem to have a tendency to congregate in London, and I was able to reconnect with some amazing old friends of mine; the happiness that this brought me cannot easily be expressed in words. I lived in the same city as my older sister for the first time in nearly 10 years (the morning that I showed up for lectures with HP smeared across my face attests to some of the perks of this!), I was also able to see my aunt Penny and cousin Laurence more regularly than I ever have in my life. I made new friends, wonderful new friends, too.
As I write this, I don’t feel sad or emotional that its over. What’s left is happiness, fond memories, an overwhelming gratitude for an amazing opportunity. And perhaps a smouldering, glowing love for microbes, and a desire to understand more about their tiny little world, the infections they cause, how we can kill them, how we can work with them. I said many times over the last year “I don’t want to be ‘A microbiologist.’” I couldn’t see myself peering down a microscope all day. During my thesis-writing-pits-of-hell weeks I would watch enviously as my housemates donned scrubs and stethoscopes and headed off to be real medical students, wishing I could join them. My return to medicine couldn’t come quickly enough….
But on only my second day back in hospital I found myself sneaking off into the cosy intrigue of the lab, all crystal violet stains and worn chairs, and blood smears dyed a variety of pretty colours, shiny new microscopes and ancient centrifuges, friendly people in white coats and a fuzzy telling broadcasting Ghana v Zambia. It was my first time there, but it felt like home.
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