Building a career in social work while navigating CF

Will: If you don’t mind me asking, what did you graduate with your master’s in?

Jenny: I got my master’s in social work.

Will: What made you want to get into social work?

Jenny: I think that is inherently who I am. When I went to college previously, when I got my undergrad, I never, ever thought that I would pursue a career. And I at that point pursued psychology. I was just very interested in it. And the goal in itself was just to get an education.

And then when I had decided to go to grad school with the thought of like having a career someday, social work just really called to me. The values of social work are very consistent with my personal values. And it’s such a varied field. There’s so, so many things you can do within the field. And I just really felt kind of a calling to work with people.

Will: You mentioned that your CF social worker had a huge impact on you. And your decision to go into this, but how did your health factor into that decision? Because just speaking as another person with CF, it factors into probably close to 90% of decisions that I make, my wife and I make, my family makes. So how did that impact your decision?

Jenny: Yeah, it was huge. Again, when I pursued my undergraduate degree, I never thought a career was on the table. My health at that point was fairly stable, but not to a point where I could have had a full-time job.

So again, at that point, like, education was the goal. And I loved it so much. And I always kind of thought, if I could go back to school, I would love to. But it didn’t make sense to go into debt or to pursue an advanced degree when a career was not an option for me.

However, I started a new medication in late 2019, and the effects of that medication were just so far beyond anything I imagined. And it took a while, I would say, for me to start to realize that that might be a permanent thing, that it wasn’t just a fluke.

And in a few months, I was going to be incredibly sick again. And at that point, I started to wonder what I wanted to do with that.

I thought if I wanted to go back to work, or if I needed to go back to work at some point, what kind of work would I do?

And there were a few times, honestly, that I would kind of wake up in a panic thinking my daughter’s getting older. I have spent the last decade and a half just really focusing on my health. Day in and day out, just the daily tasks of taking care of CF and then raising my kid. And I really felt like my entire identity had formed around those things.

And to have so much more kind of time and energy and freedom to start to explore other things was a little bit scary, actually. And it was in one of those kind of panicky moments where I was waking up through the night wondering, what am I going to do with this future?

This was around the same time that I’d had this conversation with my social worker, after I’d been considering social work. That’s when I really decided to pursue a social work program. And I never, ever would have if not for those changes in my health.

I’m at kind of this new transition where I have graduated and I have my degree, and I have my license, and I’m now looking at starting this career, and my health is, again, such a big factor in that.

There are a million things that I could do with this degree that I would love to do. But ultimately, the deciding factor will be like where I can get the best health benefits or, you know, to ensure that I have the resources and the support that I need for my health.

Will: All of us at some point, whether it’s with our own CF team or in a hospital, say, have advocated for ourselves, you know, trying to get the best care possible. The right care. Do those experiences you think influence how you think about social work and fighting for, you know, people that look to you and, to be their kind of guiding light?

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I think that advocacy is such a big part of social work, advocating for clients, but also helping them advocate for themselves, not just in the health care system, but in all areas of life. And to have had a lot of practice and personal insight has been incredibly helpful.

Another thing that is life experience, but very specifically life experience because of CF, is the amount of death and loss and grief that I have experienced.

So one of my practicum placements was in hospice, and that is an area that I am currently pursuing, is going back to hospice to work because of my personal experience in that and sitting in those dark spaces and really navigating that grief, I found that that’s a really comfortable thing for me to do now, is to help others through that experience.

So again, both of those things, advocacy within the health care system and outside of it, and also like grief and loss, I have such interest in those things and am so good at those things because of CF.

Will: What’s the advice you would give for an adult with CF who may want to look to pursue higher education and further their career?

Jenny: The time will pass anyway. Sometimes it’s scary to imagine something different, or it can be scary to take the steps to do new things or to better your life. Because we don’t know what that will look like. We don’t know if our end goal is actually going to be where we end up. And so that can be really scary and I think prevent us from taking those steps.

And so I think there’s like a really great power in trusting ourselves to navigate that and to navigate the unknown and to take those steps, because the time will pass anyway.

And five years from now, you could be at your goal, you could be halfway to your goal, you could still be in your starting place, but you’ll never, ever know unless you, like, take the chance and at least take some of those steps.

So that’s kind of maybe my advice or just a thought I guess. That time’s going to pass anyway. What do you want to do with it?