As a car enthusiast, I have always been drawn to the title of Tom Cochran’s song, “Life Is a Highway.” Each turn, twist, and stop and the new people I meet on my highway of life have shaped who I am today.
My journey started at what I describe as my “Reflection Stop.” At this juncture in my career, I was doing something completely different from health care. I worked in the area of information technology and project management. I got to fix programmatic problems, and I enjoyed what I did. However, I kept having the cliché yearning of “I want to help people.” With that, I packed my bags, figuratively, and started on my next journey . . . pharmacy school!
With my foot on the pedal, I was moving full speed ahead toward my destination—inpatient pediatric pharmacy. However, during my second year of pharmacy school, I hit a significant speed bump that redirected my journey. I’ll call this speed bump my “Lightbulb Stop.” My aunt, to whom I was very close, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. My family is Korean, and I am Korean American. My aunt’s staple food item was rice, and I observed how my family took every word from her provider literally. For many months, my family would not let my aunt eat rice. You can imagine the emotional distress and decreased quality of life that caused her. As I was learning about diabetes in school, I excitedly went to my aunt to apply the concepts I learned toward her medication regimen and to teach her everything I was learning about lifestyle modifications. I wanted to run back to her yelling, “You can still eat rice!” I vowed to myself that I would do everything in my power to learn all I could about diabetes so that I could then, in turn, provide education and resources for people to better self-manage their diabetes.
It was this experience during pharmacy school that made me fall in love with patient care, the principles of health literacy and cultural sensitivity, and the concept of patient empowerment. I stayed on this journey until I passed the “Just Go Stop,” and I haven’t looked in my rearview mirror since.
I entered postgraduate training with the goal of obtaining more diabetes experiences and earning hours so that I could take, at the time, the CDE exam. I had this vision of opening my own community pharmacy with an education center built inside where I would have the opportunity to teach my patients all about diabetes.
Although I am not taking over the world of community pharmacies, I am incredibly honored that I am where I am today. I am a CDCES, BC-ADM working in an academic general internal medicine primary care clinic where I have the privilege of working with people with diabetes and the opportunity to share information with colleagues and students. I have so much fun working with and empowering my patients, and the moments when patients tell me, “In God’s heart, you are special” remind me that the turn I made on the highway several years ago was the right turn.
Katherine S. O’Neal, PharmD, MBA, BCACP, CDES, BC-ADM, AE-C, CLS, FADCES, is with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences in Oklahoma City, OK.