The desire to play doctor during a person’s childhood is quite often an early sign that this person will pursue a career as healthcare provider. I can only imagine that this sign and the corresponding developments are amazing things to witness as a parent.
I can also imagine that it is less amazing for a parent to witness a child who does not play doctor but becomes an actual patient instead. A child who sees a tree, needs to climb it, and falls down from it. Who sees a traffic barrier, looks for a long branch in the woods, decides to go pole vaulting, and fails miserably. Who wants to be a bird, climbs up the backrest of a chair, decides that he can fly from the chair to the other side of the room, and crashes his head onto the pointy edge of a bed.
Why could he not just break a leg rather than hurting himself in the most idiotic ways possible? Would his teachers suspect any child abuse because his body is practically always bruised and battered? Will he even make it to adulthood? And when he will start living independently, what kind of self-destruction will he unleash upon himself?
These are some situations and questions that my parents had to deal with when I was younger, and I am sorry for putting them through of all of them. In spite of these and many other Frank-associated challenges, I do know that they sometimes also enjoyed being my parent and that they are proud that I made it this far in life (with surprisingly few physical limitations).
My parents are also proud that I decided to start my pharmacy studies back in 2007. This may be seen as proof that my frequent encounters with healthcare professionals did not scare me off from wanting to make a contribution to healthcare. Still, these encounters did leave some sort of scar, as I want to make people better though without touching them.
Rest assured, I am not afraid of touching people. I just really do not like the idea that I am causing more pain to a person who already is suffering too much.
Rest assured, this does not apply to suffering in sports, because I very much like to accelerate when I see one of my cycling buddies struggling to keep my pace.
Rest assured, I am the one who is struggling most of the times, and my cycling buddies gratefully take advantage of such situations by increasing the pace. And I let them do that.
Joking aside, there are numerous opportunities for contributing to healthcare without touching patients, and I feel blessed for having walked on several paths which could have led to inspiring jobs. Interestingly, no single one of these paths but rather the combination of them brought me to a pivotal moment in my life, which is the day I decided to hand in an application for the position of tenure track assistant professor in Personalized Pharmacotherapy at the University of Groningen. This application eventually led to a job offer which I gratefully accepted, and I will embark on the corresponding journey on March 1, 2022.
(FYI: I can imagine that the last sentence contains information that may sound strange to some of you, so please read more about the University of Groningen here and read more about what a ‘tenure track assistant professor’ position is in one of my previous blog posts)
Central to my next position are the notions that there are many (therapeutic) drugs available to doctors, that there are sometimes several different drugs available to treat the same medical condition, and that ongoing developments in science and analytical technologies allow us to obtain loads of data on the individual makeup of human beings. With respect to the latter, these data have a huge potential for tailoring drug treatments to the individual patient, which represents a desired next step beyond using one-size-should-fit-all treatments.
As for me, I believe that my studies, interests, and experiences have prepared me for making contributions to the personalization of drug treatments, and I cannot wait to put my heart and soul into it. Also, I am looking forward to joining both the PharmacoTherapy, -Epidemiology & -Economics (PTEE) department of the University of Groningen and the Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology (CPP) department of the University Medical Center Groningen, and I will do my utmost to contribute to the large numbers of important research initiatives going on in these departments.
Groningen, it is great to be back and to continue making my dreams come true.
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