Brief Bio:
Cathy lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, dog, and two cats. After postdoctoral research in immunology, she focused on medical regulatory writing with pharmaceutical companies. She devotes time to her faith in Catholicism as well as social welfare, educational and activist projects, yoga, Reiki and meditation, and a cappella singing.
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I was born in Washington D.C., the youngest of 3 children. My mother is French, she’s now 93 and lives near Washington. She came from France to get a master’s degree in English and met my father in 1948. They were both working on their degrees in English at a university in Ohio. My father went on to work for the Veterans Administration. Sadly, he died of lung cancer, maybe because he was a heavy smoker, when he was only 37 years old. I have no memory of him whatsoever. I do know through my mother and sister that he was a gregarious guy, who loved to sing and dance and quote poetry. That left my mother to support a family of four on her own.
My mother taught French at a college in D.C. but lost her job due to not having the PhD qualification. She got another teaching job at a small college in Danville, Kentucky, when I was in 8th grade. It was a small town and it initially felt like we were moving to the other side of the moon.
In D.C., I had gone to a small Catholic girls’ school run by nuns. My brother also went to a Catholic school for boys – it was what my mother felt was proper and optimal for education and good (aka, Catholic) behavior. We were living in a residential area, but I was aware of all sorts of things going on with the government and that there were congressmen and senators living near us. I remember a man who worked for President Johnson who lived just two doors away and playing with his kids.
Moving to Danville was a weird and sharp contrast. It was a very small town, people had accents, and my mother was French and may as well have been a Martian. It took a little while, but I ended up loving it and lived there till I graduated from High School. I remember going on hay rides in the Fall and everybody going to football games. It was a close-knit community and there was a traditional feel to so many things. But my mother and brother hated all those things, and never got over not being in a city. My sister, being 10 years older, was already at college by that time and never even saw Kentucky while we were living there.
My mother was a devout Catholic and took us to Mass every Sunday. But I realized when I got older that she never talked to us about her faith or about God even though it seemed like it was a very important part of her life. We of course had to go to Mass every Sunday and on holy days and go to confession at the appropriate times. But mainly, “because it was a sin if we didn’t do it.” But, funnily enough, we were always late for church because my mother was never on time for anything. I remember thinking “If this is so important, why can’t she be on time?” It was this rigid doctrine about what we had to do but never with any discussion as to why it was important for us or for her. And to this day, she never has talked about it. Not even when I have asked her about how she prays. She just closes up like a clam, as if she can’t talk about it.
In Kentucky, I had to go to public school and this was terrifying, because there were boys and because you could wear whatever you wanted to wear. All of this was scary after small classes with girls and nuns and uniforms. I was also a very shy kid. I think I was 14 when I came to the realization that I was shy and awkward but didn’t want to be that way. I thought, “Hey, I don’t have to be friends with just these few people I know. I can be friends with lots of these other kids who are funny and smart and doing interesting things.” I can’t remember what might have triggered this. I blossomed when I realized it didn’t serve me to be shy and introverted and I made a conscious decision to change and be outgoing. I made a lot of new friends and they were kind of nice and it wasn’t scary. In fact, I made friends with pretty much everyone and wasn’t part of any one clique at school.
In Danville, there was a small Catholic church in our town which we attended. I dutifully went to Sunday school. CCD, as the Catholics call it, was religious education offered by all parishes if you’re not going to Catholic school. CCD is pretty universally awful. Parents volunteer to teach these sessions and they get no training whatsoever. You’re handed a book and a curriculum but that’s it. You can be completely incompetent in dealing with children and conveying information but that’s OK, you’re the CCD teacher. I myself taught CCD for 5 years when my own kids were in school. Anyway, I went to church with my mother in Danville. Catholics were definitely a minority in the area and it felt a little unusual. I sang with a youth choir; I think it was called the Teen Choir or something goofy like that. We sang at the weekly mass and in the ‘70s it was a trendy thing to play the guitar and sing folk music. But having that role at my church was really important to me and I was part of a tight group of friends who all sang together. Most of the other kids in town were Baptist or some other Protestant denomination. As I recall, there was only 1 Jewish family in the whole town.
It was a predominantly white town, with a fair number of African American kids in school but sadly, with the vestiges of the south, these families lived on one side of town; some of those houses were nice, and some not so nice. When I was in High School, it wasn’t too bad as far segregation even though the white kids sat together at lunch and the black kids sat together at lunch. There were a few inter-racial couples and we thought, “Isn’t that daring?!” but there wasn’t any hostility that I ever sensed. The sports teams were evenly populated representing the student body as far as race. And the black athletes who seemed to me to be much more talented than the white ones, were respected and revered. That was kind of nice, some progress had been made I think. But at that time, there were no Muslims, no Asians, no one who was truly “foreign” perhaps other than my mother! That one token Jewish person ran this nice clothing store. Later when I went to college and met girls who were Jewish or Asian American or from Puerto Rico, I was just in awe, ‘Wow, what’s that like?” I can see now why people growing up in small towns were somewhat shielded and not exposed to much that was common in other places across the US.
Even though my mother kept bemoaning the fact that I was in public school in the middle of nowhere, I felt that I got a very good education. I was bright and fell into classes with the other bright kids; in our group, we all knew we were headed for college. But by 10th grade, there were other kids who knew they were not going to take Trigonometry, for instance, and would end their education with High School. I took calculus, physics, geometry and things like that. We had excellent teachers for these subjects. Mr H taught us chemistry and physics and he was just great – he really knew his stuff, was very serious about it and wanted to make sure we understood the material. I haven’t thought about him in almost 40 years. I remember he had a thick Southern accent and some very conservative religious practices that we never quite understood. He always wore a white buttoned-down shirt and brown or black polyester pants. He had a very short haircut and he was married to the Latin teacher. I took 3 years of Latin with his wife. She seemed quite a bit younger than he was and we wondered about that. I think she had been his student somewhere. She never wore make up and was always in long skirts that went below her knees and so we decided that their religion was very important to them though they never talked about it in school. They both seemed very smart and she clearly loved Latin and teaching us.
I was one of the nerdy kids who took Latin. There weren’t a lot of language offerings in High school. I had done 2 years of Spanish and I already knew French. In fact, I remember someone said, “You could be teaching French.” I opted for Latin and liked it.
Mr. H was such an influence and that’s what got me into science. I remember one physics lab where we had these wave tanks. They were round, about 2 feet wide, filled with water and were propped up a couple of feet off the floor. There were three of us in a group working together. We turned on the machine and something in the center moved and generated these concentric waves, and I remember thinking, “This is the coolest thing ever.” All those mathematical formulae about waves on the blackboard and now, we could see these translated into motion that was real. It was so much fun to see this connection between the math that’s just an equation in a book and the reality when you measure it in the physical world. We could see the waves in the water in our little lab in our little school in little Kentucky. I also remember that Mr. H used to say to the class as a whole, “I know you’re all going to go on and do great things.” It’s those small things that were a big influence even though at the time, we never realized it.
I did well on my SATs and my mother later said, “I guess that school wasn’t so bad after all!” She moved back to D.C. just before my senior year and because I was going into my senior year, I convinced her to let me stay with a good friend’s family and finish high school in Danville. For college, I applied to three or four different places.
I was accepted at the University of Michigan and that’s where I wanted to go even though it seemed enormous. But my mother said, “No, you’re going to Mount Holyoke”, because it was a small college and for women. I did what she wanted but it was such a culture shock and scary. It was mostly, not entirely, but mostly women from the north east (of the U.S.) who were very smart and driven. I met girls who had gone to boarding school and been valedictorians of their class. Initially I did well but by the beginning of my sophomore year, I realized I didn’t like being there. I didn’t like that it was just for women and that we got all dressed up and went by bus for parties at Amherst College which was co-ed. So, I just stopped going to class and of course, my grades showed it. When I came home for Christmas, my mother was not happy and simply said “You’re not going back next week, I’m not sending you back and spending money for you to goof off.”
I could understand what she said because she was unemployed at the time.
I was 18 then and it gave me a chance to reflect a bit about my mother. She had grown up during the Second World War in France and that hardship shaped her, for sure. Her mother had been a school teacher and her father, a former miller, and then a handyman. He was hardworking but had difficulty finding work. So, my mother was sent as a very young child to live with another woman because my grandmother didn’t feel she could raise a kid and focus on her job. My mother was about 5 when she came back to her parents and then was sent to boarding school when she was 11. I feel that she didn’t have many years with them, that she didn’t have a lot of parenting herself and then my father died so it was tough for her being a parent and having to raise three young children.
My mother seemed to be a very stressed out person when I was growing up. I also knew that she did most of the work towards her PhD in French literature but was frustrated that she never finished it. We heard this from her, “It’s because I had you kids.” Education was important for her; it was the way she got out of France and away from home. We always heard that Harvard, Yale and Princeton, these elite schools, were the symbols of success and intelligence. She wanted us to get the best grades and go to the best colleges, so we could get the best jobs, that’s what I sensed. She expected us to get good grades and if I got a B on my report card, I wouldn’t hear about the mostly As but why I got that one B. If it was a B in gym, then she didn’t care and would say, “It’s just gym.”
My sister was 10 years older and I was 7 or 8 when she left and went to college. She fought and yelled with my mother a lot. My brother who was 2 years older than me was also not around much. A year after we moved to Kentucky, he said, “I hate this place.” My mother felt he wasn’t going to get a good education and sent him back to D.C. to live with friends and he went back to the Catholic school there. So, my whole High school years, it was just me and my Mom. It wasn’t always fun since she did not like Kentucky and felt like a fish out of water there. I guess I finally asserted myself in that sophomore year at Mount Holyoke when she said I wasn’t working hard enough. She wasn’t working at the time, so I did understand her financial concern. But she never asked me, “What’s going on? Would you be happier someplace else?” versus telling me “You’re wasting my money.” So, I packed my suitcase and left to live with my boyfriend. That was the last time she did anything for me financially and I never asked her for anything again. Some months later, we made up and started seeing each other again and established a more normal relationship but it was a serious rift that has left a bit of a divide between us.
My boyfriend, Todd, was a motivating factor for this confrontation with my mother. He was my first real love and he was wonderful. Looking back, he was sweet, a nice guy and in my mind, a very good reason for leaving home. My argument with my mother, besides being about my grades, got into things like, “Why are you with this guy? I’m sure you’re sleeping with him and all of this is bad.” I disagreed with her on pretty much everything. Anyway, my boyfriend and I were together for a year and a half in Massachusetts. We had horrible jobs and after a horrendous winter (with feet and feet of snow), we moved to New Jersey to live with his mother.
We then got an apartment and I spent another year with him but didn’t feel happy. I decided something had to change. When I’d left home to be with him, I was very emotionally and romantically engaged but later I realized that we didn’t really have that much in common. We were going in different directions. We broke up and I decided to go back to college. We lost touch with each other almost immediately.
I applied as a transfer student and got into the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Being at Penn was great. It wasn’t easy, but I liked it. I’m a pretty driven person and decided that I would double major in biology and art history.
I’ve always loved animals and thought I’d like to be a veterinarian. In my senior year in High School, I worked at a veterinary clinic. I was there on Saturdays and one or two other days during the week. I mostly answered the phones because it was a clinic with three veterinarians who were usually out on calls working on large animals at the nearby farms. One Saturday, an owner came in with a very sick dog. I called Dr. Nash, the head vet, and said, “There’s a Black Lab here. He’s swallowed something, and he looks really bad.” He drove back to the clinic, did a quick exam and said to me, “There’s no one else here so you’re going to have to help me with this.” He got the dog on the table, anesthetized him and cut him open and I helped as best I could. I was totally fascinated by what we were doing, turning that dog inside out. The dog did well and recovered and I felt that assisting in that surgery was amazing.
So, at Mount Holyoke, I thought I would continue with the path to vet school. But during my freshman year, I decided, “I’m not going to stop at animals, I want to fix people and I want to go to medical school.” I always thought the most noble thing one could do was to heal an animal or a person; that it’s the only thing that matters. I’m not sure when exactly that started in me. I continued college as a pre-med student and felt that science was the most important thing to know to really help people. Even though everything else was interesting, other subjects seemed somewhat frivolous by comparison. No one in my family had specialized in any kind of science; my mother studied English and French literature, my sister is a French medievalist, and my brother has an MBA. And I remember thinking, “All of that is frivolous, only medicine and science matters for mankind.”
While in college, I did other things as well. I sang in a choir and founded an a capella group. I also worked full time to put myself through college. This included a work-study job in a lab that studied monoclonal antibodies. They said I was the best work-study student they had ever had. But the schizophrenic part was that I was doing all these things but didn’t study very hard. I always needed to be busy doing something and when I had to sit with my books, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything. Altogether, I had a good time in college even though I was crazy busy.
When I graduated from Penn, I applied to a few medical schools but didn’t get in. My GPA was a 3.2 or 3.3 and that wasn’t good enough. Back then, only 50% of people who applied got in. I was disappointed but decided that I’d work for a while and reapply. I was living in West Philadelphia in a small apartment. I needed a job to pay the bills, saw an ad and applied to be a lab technician in a microbiology research lab at Hahnemann Medical School. It seemed like a good link between my work-study experience and plans for medical school. At the end of the 2nd year at the research tech job, I applied again. This time I got wait listed at Tufts University in Boston but accepted at the off-shore medical school in Grenada. I was disappointed, to say the least!
Around that time, I met Lou, my future husband. I had moved into an apartment in Center City Philadelphia and started having some problems with peeping toms looking into my third-floor windows from the roof above my apartment. To solve that problem, I moved in with Lou that May, saying, “Well, I guess I’m going to live with you till I go to Grenada.” By chance, I discussed my plans with the pre-med counselor at Penn whom I had consulted with before. I happily told her I had been accepted at Grenada and she said, “No, no, you’re not going there, you’ll be a laughing stock if you go there.” I listened to her and didn’t go. I sometimes wonder if I made the right decision.
And then, I got engaged. Also, at the time, Rick Rest, a professor at Hahnemann where I was working, said, “Why don’t you get a graduate degree here and continue with research?” He completely changed my thinking and I joined his lab as a PhD student studying how our immune system responds to gonorrhea, a nasty sexually-transmitted disease affecting people all over the world.
Being in graduate school woke up a drive in me to work to develop cures for diseases. I remember one class that happened to be taught by Rick; he posed a hypothetical medical situation to all the students and asked, “What would you do?” I immediately answered, “We need to make an effective monoclonal antibody.” And I remember he then said, “You should go work for a drug company.” That piqued my curiosity about industry research. I probed a bit more and learned that drug companies don’t just study some esoteric process for years and years and go deep into the details because it’s intellectually interesting. They did research to find an effective product to fix something and treat a disease.
So, after my PhD I headed for post-doctoral work in HIV/AIDS research and I got a true taste of how drug companies work. There’s not just the beauty of the science and research but a lot of political stuff and people wanting to get ahead with their career and publishing for the sake of publishing. But in those two years of my post-doc, I got schooled in both the very good and very bad aspects of working for a drug company.
By this time, I was married and had three children (I’d had two during graduate school). Interestingly, my postdoctoral advisor was a woman who essentially said to me, “You can’t be a mother and be a good scientist.” Needless to say, she was childless herself. By coincidence, another friend shared her work experiences with me about being a medical writer for a drug company and how she really enjoyed it. Because of my research in HIV/AIDS, I applied and landed a writing job with Wyeth, another big drug company in the area.
I had to think hard about accepting this job. It meant walking away from the lab bench, doing my own research and being able to ask on a daily basis, “What question do I answer today?” I would be writing up the results of drug trials and answering questions that someone else had thought up and proven. It seemed like the nature of what I would be doing was changing so much. I knew I was a decent writer and decided this was still science and about therapies that could help people. I also knew this choice would be good for my family life.
Twenty-seven years later, I think it all worked out with my career. I like to think that I’m still living my dream about putting therapies out there that are helping people with chronic diseases. That’s the thing that drives me, that I’m getting information out there that’s helping to heal people.
In my work life and parent life, I’ve always been a religious person as well as a faithful person. “Religion” to me is the set of conventions under which you worship God. I remained a devout practicing Catholic until I got to be in my late 40s. And then, something changed.
We were living in a very conservative area, the Philadelphia archdiocese, which is probably the most or one of the most conservative in the country. They do things like urge you to vote for Republicans because they’re anti-abortion. I got tired of the things that were being said from the pulpit in our church and somewhat disillusioned with the Catholic church even though I still believe they do a lot of good in the world. But by chance, a friend of ours who went to a Lutheran church invited us to join her one Sunday. We heard this wonderful pastor who was a woman! She gave an amazing sermon and was articulate, funny and referenced all sorts of literary and biblical sources. I thought, “Wow, church can be like this?” Not quite but almost overnight, we switched churches. A Lutheran service is very much like a Catholic service though perhaps with better music and better sermons! The big difference is of course that we don’t follow the Pope and there is no hierarchy that the Catholic church is based on, where a priest does everything. In the Lutheran church, everyone is equal and I found that to be quite appealing.
My worship of God has been important and a part of my life, all my life. I start my day with prayer; I say the rosary recognizing that this had become an ingrained habit, and then just basically thank God and talk to God, asking things for my family, myself, others, the world. Then I meditate for a few minutes. I think of God, and thank God, almost constantly during my daily activities. I like to think it drives a lot of how I behave at work towards my colleagues, my work ethic, working with integrity and honesty and not putting myself first. I’m not at all political in my job. I think it cost me in some ways, as far as promotions or getting raises, but I have always said what I thought and never just what I thought my boss wanted to hear. I have always tried to make sure I give credit to those who deserve it. It’s what feels right to me.
So, I like to think that the things that I say I believe in drive what I do.
My job as a writer documenting drug trials has allowed me to look at the data and make sure there is nothing that would be an issue if someone used this drug. That’s where I feel the integrity comes in. It’s not just about getting amazing results with a drug for lowering blood pressure or some other condition but also noting if there are any side effects. Have we been thorough and transparent in all that we say and document in this report? I think that’s how my sense of responsibility plays out with helping people. I have the power to do that in my position even though I’m not the statistician or the physician or the bench scientist, I still have the chance to ask a lot of questions.
I feel bad that I didn’t do more with my kids’ religious upbringing. At big holidays like Christmas and Easter, we’d go to church together; during dinner, I’d talk a little about what that meant, about Jesus being born for us, or dying for us. But we didn’t read the Bible together or that sort of thing. I wasn’t good about saying grace before meals. But as my four kids were growing up, I was each one’s CCD teacher for at least 1 year. I wanted them to see how important my faith was to me. My kids are now in their twenties and none of them go to church which alarms and saddens me. My three boys say they “don’t believe in this stuff” and my daughter says she believes in God but she’s just lazy about going to church. I don’t know why it’s not important to them.
Despite my faith and prayer over all these years, I had never felt the presence of God. I guess I’m in good company because supposedly, Mother Theresa felt that way as well. But I did have one special experience. In addition to working for a drug company, I also teach yoga, meditation, and Reiki which is a form of energy healing. During my own Reiki training, my teacher was doing an ‘attunement’, an initiation that opens your energy channels so you can in turn transfer healing energy to others. It was in 2011, a terrible time in my life when I had made some bad personal decisions and was feeling pretty adrift. My eyes were closed, and as my Reiki teacher touched me, this voice came from deep inside me saying, “It will be alright.” And I know it was God. It was the one and only time that I had this experience and I keep hoping I’ll have it again.
I know I have this weird dichotomy with being grounded in science versus doing things like Reiki. For most of my life I have wanted the data and the facts to convince myself that something was real like with the wave machine experiment in High School. But this need for proof doesn’t apply to my faith or for my Reiki practice. I know Reiki works. I think, eventually, when scientific instruments are more sophisticated, we’ll know why energy healing works though we don’t really have proof now. I think God is energy and that’s why this energy all around us provides the power to heal.
I do have a bucket list with one thing at the top of the list. I’d like to have a healing center with all kinds of therapies, with a counsellor, yoga, meditation, tai chi, Reiki and all things that help people heal from within. I believe people largely have the power to heal themselves and I would like to bring this to more people. That’s what I’d like to be offering full time.
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