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  • CAREER COLUMN

Being a caregiver while caring about a PhD

Luke Yates discusses how he coped with his wife’s long illness during his PhD programme.
  1. Luke Yates

    1. Luke Yates is an Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) Faculty Fellow in the Section of Synthetic and Structural Biology at Imperial College London, UK.

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In summer 2008, a year after I started my PhD programme, my wife Samantha was admitted to hospital with a severe chest infection. Sam had cystic fibrosis, and the infection wreaked havoc on her lungs. After a protracted hospitalization, she could not breathe unaided. Furnished with a canister of oxygen and breathing apparatus (a mainstay from then on), along with a substantial amount of antibiotics and other medications, she left hospital, and we carried on with our lives as best as we could. Sam went back to her job teaching a school class of 9–10-year-olds, and I continued pursuing my PhD in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford, UK. But she experienced another infection, which ended with her doctors wait-listing her for a double lung transplant. In January 2010, Sam gave up work, and we began to hope for a life-saving telephone call.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00049-w

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

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