Ovarian Cancer: A Short Story

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It was an early morning in Poland when I woke up and beat the rooster to its morning call. My family took my sister and me across the Atlantic to meet my grandparents for the first time. I was about 4 years old at the time. During a couple of months in Poland, my grandmother showed me how to feed the pigs, milk the cows, and even make homemade butter. Enthusiastically, she taught me all the necessary skills that are required to living on a farm, for instance, understanding weather patterns and seasonal preparations. As someone who was born and raised in Brooklyn, this was an eye-opening experience. A couple of years ago, my family got a startling phone call about my grandmother not feeling too well. We heard that she was not able to walk down the stairs or stand up for too long, which became a burden to maintain the farm. Everyone in the family flew back to Poland only to discover that she developed ovarian cancer. All the moaning and crying from the pain and fear of what was to come traumatized us all. The bright light down the dark tunnel was calmly fading away. As my grandmother laid on the hospital bed, I gave her a last goodbye kiss on her cheek. Confusion, hopelessness, and outrage were the emotions that roamed through my head. I did not understand why a human being like my grandmother who worked diligently from morning to …show more content…

The professor of this course, Dr. Hirshfield, allowed me to do research in his lab. For a semester, my team and I worked on an E. coli strain JW0623, a small colony variant, that express specific genes when encountered with a stressor. The following summer, I transitioned from a biology lab to a physics lab where I did research with Dr. Long. My research involved a molecule known as V2O2, a unique chemical that could switch from an insulator to a conductor. This mechanism is unprecedented and has an expansive role in computers and

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