"To love what you do and feel that it matters how could anything be more fun?" Katharine Graham
Fulfilled
Pathologist is not a career kids normally pick out in grade school, but it was for Camille Saroyan. She'd watched, fascinated, when her fourth grade teacher had dissected an earthworm for the class, edging out the boys so that she could get a better look. Watching the innards ooze out didn't come close to grossing her out and really made her wonder all the more what made the thing work in the first place. From then on, while she had done well all across the board in school, she excelled in science.
Her parents, happy though they were that their daughter had found something productive to pour her energies into, were nevertheless concerned that the teenager's fascination with dead things would turn macabre and when it came time to choose a college, they suggested she go pre-med and consider a career either as a physician or perhaps a surgeon.
Throwing her full energy into the effort, she'd reveled in all of her bio courses, excited to learn exactly what made the human body tick. The further she went along, though, the more she realized that she was much more interested in taking bodies apart to decide what had gone wrong than in putting them back together again.
She'd found out quickly that pathology was not among the more glorified positions, even when one worked for a very well-funded hospital. Even so, she enjoyed the work and kept telling herself that the crappy places were all just stepping stones to get to where she really wanted to be.
And so when she entered the Jeffersonian for the first time, breathing in the purified air and eyeing the equipment that had come from a medical supply place instead of Sears, she knew she'd made it. This was the stuff that dreams were made of and it was all under her command. With all of the bells and whistles available to her, she thought, the rest should be a cakewalk, right?