Yesterday I passed a huge personal milestone: shadowing a medical examiner. This may seem to come out of nowhere, as I’ve thus far barely mentioned my career plans after writing of the culmination of my time at Fitbit and Google. But my gears started turning in late 2024 after my Japan and Vietnam trip. Long story short, I’ve been taking classes for the last year and a half and have thus had very little time to write!

Bay Bridge Wednesday morning traffic

Back in high school, I got interested in forensic pathology, admittedly initially inspired by the show Crossing Jordan. I haven’t watched any of the CSI-type shows, or much TV at all, in the years since. My sustained thinking about this comes more from my eternal interest in many things science and medicine, love of using microscopes, my interest in law and politics and government. The work of a medical examiner intersects all these things, so I thought that would be a cool career choice!

But over the course of my time in college, the hope of going to med school faded with the realization I wasn’t getting good enough grades. I had started working multiple jobs from my first semester, and it only increased from there to more than full time. I loved all those jobs, and my four years at The Badger Herald directly led to the tech career I ended up in for the next 15. Yes, I tend to get super absorbed in things I am doing, which is why I need to be intentional about what I start. That was true then, but I was absorbed more in how I was paying for school and less in the courses themselves! At the time I thought passing was mostly what mattered, whereas getting all As should have been my sole focus. After extending one semester and briefly considering trying to go to law school, the call of a waiting tech job got to me, and the rest is history.

With the end of my Fitbit and Google era, I had no idea what I wanted to come next. I knew I needed to travel a bit, and that trip with Patton was perfect timing for us both. I was getting really into backpacking again, and thought about taking an additional year off to spend in the mountains with Ruffie as much as possible. I also of course had to consider what kind of company I wanted to work for next. Something smaller, more like the Fitbit I initially joined back in 2017 and loved. Something even more in the sciences, like what I was hoping for before I decided on Fitbit.

And then it started: Could I go back to my plan of becoming a doctor? I waffled on this many times over the next months, plotting out how many years of study it would take, how difficult the content is, how hard I want to work, how much learning capacity I even have left. And then the financial considerations: Is it remotely possible I could float myself till the point of getting into med school with my lifelong savings? Why did I buy a house that has crashed in price, and should I abandon it right now since I am underwater on my loan? What’s going to happen to my investments if Trump is elected, or not elected?

It was all so much, so I decided to just start in that direction and “decide later”. I knew I would need to improve my GPA from the 2.9ish I had in my bachelor’s degree (though at least that was in biochemistry and I technically had all the prerequisites). I knew I’d need letters of recommendation, from teachers I no longer knew. And of course, I knew I’d need to take and smash the MCAT.

After some research, I learned of a “postbacc” program at UC-Berkeley. I attended an information session, and was somewhat excited by hearing of others in my position, but let down by the fact even that program had a 3.0 GPA cutoff. They did say to apply anyway, but I had a bad feeling. I decided to start taking some classes ad hoc just to get my feet wet. So in January 2025, I began first semester biology, first semester general chemistry and second semester general chemistry. I wasn’t sure if that was a terrible idea, but figured if I couldn’t pull that off, then maybe med school wasn’t for me. And I set myself up by reading as much of the Campbell Biology textbook as I could before the semester started, making flashcards for every thing and concept I didn’t already know, and many that I did!

Long story short, it went well. I was scared to death about letting myself down and probably put in more work than necessary, but at least I got all As for those classes. And then for first semester organic chemistry in the summer, though that was a lot of work! And then in the fall, I took the second semester, as well as physiology and first and second semester physics. I was falling severely behind in my flashcards process by the end of last year, but it was enough to get all As. And now I am only taking two classes, but they are continuing to take all my time: biochemistry and molecular cell biology.

I’m having so much fun learning though! It’s hard to compare to my 20-years-ago experience since I apparently didn’t journal about it much and I don’t remember how much I learned but have since forgotten. I am 95 percent sure I am learning a ton more this time. Encoding everything in my Anki flashcard system continues to humble me about how quickly I can forget things I don’t constantly practice. So I am pretty sure there was little hope for my previous learning strategy of cramming from the textbook the night before exams. Now that I’m at the point where I have covered a large majority of the science content I should have learned before, I am feeling so much more competent. My broad strategy of trying to learn everything in my textbooks, including all the random seeming real world connections content from the chemistry books, has been surprisingly rewarding. I’m seeing connections all the time to what I’ve learned and continue to study in my flashcards. Woo!

That brings me to the next hurdle for a med school application: volunteering, shadowing and other clinical experience. My time in the biochemistry lab probably helps, but that was so many years ago. At the very least I knew I’d need many shadowing hours. Thankfully, one of the virtues of being older is I have many people in my network who are doctors, including a few good friends. I have not needed to employ the desperate cold-calling strategy I read about in Student Doctor Network and Reddit forums to find shadowing opportunities, aside from the fact I could not seem to locate a pathologist to talk to, much less a forensic pathologist. But I was content to keep my ears peeled and worry about that more once I had the basic coursework finished. And it’s a good thing I wasn’t in a hurry, because the first shadowing gig I lined up took a comically long year to work through the organization’s bureaucracy. (Admittedly there were a few monthslong periods in there I could have pestered more annoyingly, but a few tech transitions on their end had my paperwork lost in the shuffle.)

All that’s to say I reached the point of starting shadowing over the last four months. And a last minute trip to buy clothes when I realized I had very little suitable and still-fitting business casual attire!

First I spent three days with a rheumatologist in an outpatient clinic setting. That went very well and was a great introduction. Having taken physiology last semester was super helpful, and I got to add dozens of new words to my vocabulary. And while I was supposed to be a fly on the wall, some patients still talked with me, and even asked my opinions, which was slightly awkward. :-) I was so thankful for the opportunity, and it gave me much confidence.

Then the paperwork came through for the gig with a gastroenterologist and liver doctor. I initially did an outpatient day, and then soon after two days in the hospital. The experiences were so crazy different, with relatively healthy long-term-monitoring patients in the former but people who were in the end stage of liver disease in the latter. I again learned a ton of new terms, but more importantly saw a bit of how hospitals and care teams operate. I felt less intimidated than I expected by everything going on and being in the company of very smart people. I got a sense that maybe I could become competent enough to be helpful in such an environment. Though I knew pathology is a very different kind of work. Nonetheless I was excited and felt much better about my path after tech.

Last day of shadowing Nikki at Stanford Hospital

Then one of my random leads from a friend at a party finally bore fruit. I made contact with a forensic pathologist working in the area, in San Francisco no less! And I was so happy to hear that I could shadow. I was asked to send over my CV, which did take a bit of effort as I had not put one together in almost a decade (wow!). But the rest was just a matter of scheduling. We landed on yesterday.

Two days before heading in to meet the doctor, I heard tragic news from a friend that he and his husband had to euthanize their 8 year old pup who had cancer and was in a lot of pain. Moments like that are so hard, and make me think of the animals I have lost, most recently Remi and Winter. We have my first dog Vera visiting us right now, and she is 15 but still doing OK it seems. I know it’s only a matter of time, but I’m hoping she’s around some more years. She’s been going deaf but still has her regulate-everyone commanding bark! Armie is also visiting, so I got the four dogs together for a photo while thinking about my friend’s dog.

Ruffie, Sky, Vera and Armie

Wednesday morning, yesterday, I rose at 6 and got ready to head into the city by 6:30. Traffic was terrible again, just as when I headed to the hospital in Palo Alto a couple of weeks ago. Man I hope driving this routinely is not in my future! But I got there just in time at 7:55. I freaked a bit when I saw the entire street was full despite it being only an hour after street cleaning ended. But thankfully I found a spot in front of a truck.

Parking near the SF OCME.

And then I met the doctor out front, signed in and went up. We barely even had time for introductions as we walked into the start of a conference meeting with half a dozen doctors and stuff to go over the active cases and images from scene investigations. It was a cool feeling to be thrust into the heart of things, and kind of as I imagined, was much more chill than on TV!

Then we went down to do a bit of a tour, after which I went to an observation room that was about 6 feet away from where the doctor and a tech would be conducting autopsies but separated by a pane of glass. This was a little bit of a relief for a first visit because of my longstanding uncertainty if I can handle such medical procedures without fainting. I still think back to that time I felt overheated in my PPE and fainted or almost fainted (somehow now I can’t remember!) when doing retro-orbital bleeding procedures on live mice for our research. I had a brief flash of that feeling when I saw a man with a large unclosed wound on his stomach at the hospital, but it wasn’t too bad. But thankfully yesterday I had no such feelings.

It was initially a tiny bit shocking seeing how quickly the first Y incision was made and opened the body. After that point, parts of the procedure were almost too comical to focus on anything else (the use of gardening tools to break ribs, or a kitchen soup ladle). And in general there was so much going on between the tech and the doctor that I was too busy writing notes and trying to understand what I was seeing to feel fainty. But now I really want to know if I would be just as fine without that glass!

Leaving the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner after at long last a first day of shadowing!

Now I have another of my “if I fail this step, I’ll consider quitting this path” checkpoints accomplished. I’m going to continue shadowing different types of doctors to get a better understanding of how medicine works, and certainly hope to spend more time with forensic and regular pathologists. Aside from that, I’m going to be shifting focus on the MCAT, aiming to take it this fall. And hopefully I’ll also be taking more classes in the fall and spring, because I really do still need all the help I can get. But so far it’s all going so well!