The gifts we receive don't always come with a card

In 2005, my father gave me a gift that I would do anything to return. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and gave me an opportunity to help him fight the battle for his life. As his healthcare proxy in that battle, I had no HIPAA restrictions placed on what data I could see. As a colleague of several of his doctors, I was also given the equivalent of an escorted institutional "hall-pass" and got to see first hand, the real back-office of the clinical research enterprise at a major academic medical center. There I sat side-by-side the radiologists as they read my dad's CT scans. I shadowed the study coordinators as they went back and forth to the pharmacy. I watched as they printed the labels for his sample vials. I visited the lab. I visited the infusion unit. I visited the hospital chapel.

On several occasions my dad expressed his concern that I was spending too much time with him at the hospital. And each time I attempted to remind him that, as part of my job as a research analyst in life science technology, I really was working. He just happened to be the subject of my current research project. "Well if you're working," he would say, "then you should get back to your office. You're going to get fired." To which I would retort, that if he was so concerned about my career, then he should just get better, and then I would happily retreat to my desk with a nice cup of coffee and read journals detailing the results of other people's primary research on the clinical development process at investigator sites.

Ultimately my dad succumbed to his disease, and I was forced to graduate from my ethnographic research project. But I've never forgotten the lessons that I learned over those ten months. They motivate me to this day.

My father's final gift to me has become my vocation.