My first day

I mentioned yesterday that I would be starting my new job at Dana Farber today.  Well, I did.  Today we had new employee orientation and it was good.  We went over the typical new employee stuff- benefits, procedures, safety, etc.  Oh, and there was a welcome video.  It was a video meant to get all of us new hires excited for our careers at Dana Farber and to give us a sense of what working at Dana Farber is really like.  It did those things quite effectively.  It also made me cry.  I mean, it wasn't a full on sob-fest or anything like that, but I teared up, and there were sniffles.  I'm pretty confident in saying that I am the only person in the history of new employee welcome videos to have ever cried.  In my defense, there were a few reasons why this happened. The following three things, in conjunction with one another, directly contributed to my small and uncharacteristic breakdown this morning:

1) I really really really disliked my old job.  It was a very unhappy place for me and no one I worked with was particularly happy to be there either.  The people in the Dana Farber video were SO happy to be working there, they were practically oozing happiness.  It really hit me-this happiness is what I've been missing for the past year and a half, and this very same happiness is what I have to look forward to with my new job.  It was a little overwhelming.

2) The video talked about some of the advances that have been made in cancer research at Dana Faber, in particular they mentioned a drug called Gleevec.  When my mom was sick she was in an experimental study for Gleevec.  That alone was enough to bring out some emotion, but in addition to that I really believe that that treatment was something that truly made a difference in my mother's illness and the mere fact that I will be working for a place that can help make that kind of difference for others is, again, a bit overwhelming.

3) They showed footage from the marathon and talked about the DFMC.  There were clips of people running the marathon in their Dana Farber singlets and people in the crowd were shouting out "thank you" to them.  It was very moving, especially because that will be me in just over a month (yikes).

So, by the time the video ended and the lights were back on, there I was with teary eyes and a sniffly nose.  How embarrassing.  Thank God I won't be working with any of the people I was in orientation with.

Anyways, tomorrow's the first day of real work... hopefully it will be tear free.