Knowing Your Life’s Path at Just Five Years Old
A series of excerpts from our interview with pathologist Dr. Eve Crane. In the first, Dr. Crane talks about the searing moment of her childhood which changed the course of the rest of her life…
The WorkNotWork Show 0:05:07 There was a very defined moment, when you were a child, when you found your life’s professional passion and started down that path — one you’re still on today. Can you tell us about that particular time in your life when you were just five years old?
Dr. Eve Crane 0:05:22. Well, I grew up in kind of a strange town to begin with — Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is a town that was built around the national weapons laboratory. It’s a town where everybody is already thinking about science all of the time. Most people were in physics, but I think there was sense that everything to be done in physics has already been done.
So you’re thinking what can I do? What can I do to make a difference with my life? I was already thinking that when I was little. But then my dad became very ill very quickly when I was just five. He was a competitive bike racer, extremely fit, extremely active, both at work and with our family.
It was very sudden — he became extremely weak — very unbalanced and it seemed like a presentation of a brain tumour or something. Ultimately it turned out to be chronic, progressive form of multiple sclerosis which at the time — compared to a brain tumour — is certainly good news.
Most people with MS have a relapsing-remitting course, where maybe they have some times where they regain close to normal function and then later progressively may lose function after many years. But he had a thoroughly rapid, progressive course and ended up having to retire and was essentially quadriplegic for the last ten years of his life.
It was hard to even diagnose it but then there really weren’t any therapies. We just watched him slowly lose function day after day. Particularly if you look back over a year how much you would’ve lost to this. If there is anything that we can do to slow this progression it could have a huge impact.
We don’t even know what’s causing this disease. There has to be a way to slow or stop this process. That really inspired me to go into medicine, never necessarily thinking that I just wanted to treat patients, because I felt like the treatments were so limited in certain cases, but that I wanted to be behind the scenes.
It was always my thinking that I would figure out what was going on, but I needed that medical training to be able to make a difference, to be able to understand these diseases.
WNW 0:07:48 So you felt that at five years old, when this was occurring, that that really changed your life from that moment forward?
EC 0:07:57 Exactly how I was going to react is something that must have evolved over time. It’s hard to exactly say but certainly that event, when he became ill and never got better, certainly changed our family forever.
That event occurs to a number of families everyday with a diagnosis of cancer, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, or multiple sclerosis or something else. With a lot of these diseases you do not have necessarily a sudden event, like if it was a car accident or something. There’s a period of time where there really is an opportunity to fight the disease and to change the course of the disease but we simply don’t know how.
We’re getting better at that with certain diseases. Certainly with many types of cancers we now have targeted therapies where we can address that and profoundly prolong life, like chronic myelogenous leukemia, we have a drug that specifically inhibits the kinase that becomes activated.
I think there’s certainly a way in multiple sclerosis. There have been drugs introduced that can slow the course. So I think there’s definitely hope but certainly that gave me a purpose. There has to be something that we can do. And it wasn’t like a problem that ever went away – that you could forget about – because every further loss of function for him. So I think having that resolve was just stronger and stronger over time.There has to be a way that I can make a difference, ultimately not for him, but for others.
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