I just saw your ping. Thanks!
But for your and everyone’s clarification, I am not a doctor (see my tagline) nor do I have any formal “medical expertise” nor do I pretend to have any.
I am however keenly interested and rather well read as an “amateur” in both history and science.
I became interested in the Black Death while taking an advanced placement course in European history in my senior of HS and its impact - politically, socially and economically which also dovetailed nicely with the advanced placement Political Thought class I was also taking that year. I later became interested in the history of the Spanish Flu for similar reasons.
From my earliest childhood memories of being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and up until my junior of HS, I had my heart set on becoming a veterinarian and perhaps that can be blamed in part on my older brother taking me to see the movie Thomasina when I was four and watching Wild Kingdom with my dad - LOL. That didn’t happen although for I time I thought of becoming an RN. I instead took up my mother’s advice to go into bookkeeping and accounting and ended up as a payroll manager. Bless her heart but I probably shouldn’t have listened to her : (
FWIW I had conversations with doctors especially when my mom and a year and a half later my dad was in the ICU at Johns Hopkins who thought because of the questions I asked and terminology I used, assumed I was myself a doctor or a nurse or in the medical field. But asking good questions and understanding the basics and using the correct terminology doesn’t make me an “expert”. And as far as a career change, at 59 I’m a bit long in the tooth to make one now.
So you’re a Maryland expat—and not a medical doctor expat.