25 years and perspective

Today was my 25th birthday. As I sit and think about this day, I discover that I have been immensely blessed. I woke up to a surprise breakfast and gift (and balloons!) brought to me by three new friends from nursing school. I was treated to lunch by my grandparents, and my mother drove from Decatur to come see me for a few hours. I was wished happy birthday by quite a few people with whom I've not spoken in a while, and I got numerous sweet texts, an email from my other grandparents, and a phone call from my father. And my thoughtful husband stopped to get me roses on the way home from a long day of standardized patient testing in Augusta. I have been so blessed on my 25th birthday.

But my favorite gift of the entire day of gifts is that of the story I was told by my grandfather. It started something like this (I am largely paraphrasing, but this is the gist. And forgive me if my science is off -- I'm certainly not the same brilliant mind as my grandfather) :

-When I turned 25- he says -I thought about everything that had happened in the world in my 25 years. The Roaring Twenties (Calvin Coolidge was the president when I was born, then Herbert Hoover), then the Great Depression. Then Franklin Roosevelt was president for four terms-

-Too long!- interjects my grandmother

-He had been president for most of my life. Then Congress decided that a president could only serve two terms-

-Ten years.- interjects my grandmother again, winking at me. -a president can serve a maximum of ten years-

-And the German physicists came over... And they discovered the neutron. Before they thought that an atomic nucleus only had protons. You can't bombard a nucleus with protons; the positive charges repel each other. But you can bombard a nucleus with neutrons. They thought at first that they were just making higher number isotopes (and they did), but they also discovered that the nucleus would split, and when it split, it would release energy. They discovered that it was Uranium 235 that would release the energy. There is a lot more Uranium 238 than Uranium 235. And they sent letters to President Roosevelt, who gave them permission to create the atomic bomb. They made Fat Man, which I believe was a Uranium 235 bomb, and they made Little Boy, which was the plutonium bomb, that they dropped in Japan. They made huge strides in science in those 25 years.-

-And penicillin- I say, knowing that, as a doctor, he is acutely aware of the benefits of this drug that, had it been discovered a few years earlier, could have saved his mother's fingers from being amputated secondary to a needle stick that got infected.

-And penicillin was discovered- he agrees, and goes on to remind me that the first sulfonamides were created later, in the 40s. -They used breweries to make penicillin, because they were the only facilities that could sustain [he mentions the penicillin-creating organism by name] in large enough quantities.-

To all this, I comment -I feel like the history in my 25 years pales in comparison to yours.-

-Oh, mine too- grandmother assures me. -My first 25 years were boring. Just the hippie movement and drugs.-