Stepping Back to Move Forward

This semester I was doing it the "right" way. In-person classes at Tarleton State. A pre-med track. A full schedule. A dorm, a meal plan, a lab I was excited to be part of.

And this week, from a hospital bed, I made the decision to withdraw.

The honest part

I didn't fail out. I wasn't lazy. The pace just didn't fit the body I actually live in.

Rare disease doesn't care about your syllabus. It doesn't wait until after midterms. When you're NPO, on IV nutrition, and learning your way around a new feeding tube, "just push through" stops being a plan and starts being a liability.

For a while I tried to make the math work. Maybe I could take incompletes. Maybe I could catch up over break. Maybe if I just wanted it badly enough. One thing the Army teaches you is that a plan that ignores the terrain isn't a plan. It's a wish.

So I'm changing the plan, not the mission.

The mission hasn't changed

I want to work in translational research on neurodegenerative diseases — the space between a discovery in a lab and a treatment that actually reaches a patient.

Somewhere along the way I realized I'd been carrying two goals that weren't really mine: the MD and the social work degree. Both are good paths. Neither is the path to the work I actually want to do. Translational research mostly runs through a science degree, real lab experience, and eventually a PhD.

Letting go of those felt like losing something at first. Now it feels like taking off a pack I didn't need to be carrying.

The new plan

Here's the roadmap, in plain terms:

Withdraw this semester and focus on getting healthy. No GPA damage, no guilt.
Complete biology pre-reqs, part-time — two or three classes a semester, from home. Biology, chemistry, and math: the foundation every research path needs.
Stack complementary computational skills. Translational science increasingly relies on bioinformatics and analyzing massive genetic datasets. Take online electives in R and statistics.
Transfer to finish a bachelor's in neuroscience or biomedical science, still part-time, with as little time on campus as my body allows.
Get back in the lab. Research experience matters more than almost anything else for where I'm headed. Prioritizing summer undergraduate research fellowships and volunteering/shadowing at university hospitals.
Then a PhD, or a research job first, working toward neurodegenerative disease research.

It's slower on paper. But a plan I can actually finish beats a faster plan that breaks me halfway through.

I'm not the first to take the long way

While figuring all this out, I read about Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel. Sonia was a lawyer; Eric was a transportation analyst. When Sonia learned she carried the gene for a fatal prion disease, they started over — night classes in biology, volunteering and then working as lab technicians, and eventually PhDs. Today they're researchers working on a way to prevent the disease that runs in her family.

Nobody would call their path traditional. It worked anyway.

What I want you to take from this

If you're a fellow zebra staring down a semester, a job, or a plan that no longer fits your body: adjusting isn't quitting. Slowing down isn't giving up. Sometimes the bravest move is admitting the terrain changed, and redrawing the map.

I'll keep writing as this unfolds: the paperwork, the first online lab, the wins and the weird days.

Still moving forward. Just at my own pace. 🦓