Ecologist Thom Young-Bayer makes the unthinkable decision to leave science after his life changes course.
Thom Young-Bayer’s affinity for the outdoors developed into a brief career as an ecologist, during which he worked as a tropical forest guide, studied coral reef fish and kelp forests, and traveled to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Since then, he has managed two organic farms, worked on a commercial fishing vessel, sailed across the Pacific using celestial navigation, and worked as the First Mate of a Maine windjammer. He maintains his tenuous grip on sanity with open water swimming, ultra-marathon running, and classical piano. He lives with his wife, Skylar, and their two dogs in Maine.
This story originally aired on March 3, 2017.
Story Transcript
Anyone who knows me really well, knows that if there is one thing that I definitely am not, it’s a quitter. But there I was, telling my PhD advisor that I was giving up $200,000 in prestigious scholarships and dropping out of graduate school. Wow! Why would I leave academia at the start of such a prestigious career in science? Well, that really began thirty-seven years ago, when a fertilized egg in my mother’s womb divided into two.
You laugh, sure. But it is true; it is not just a cliché. When that egg divided into two, I became an identical twin. I was first born, so everybody always asks the twin, “Who was born first?” Whenever anybody asked who was born first, I would probably answer, “I was. I’m the original. He’s the copy.”
My twin brother, Kyle, quickly learned to respond, “That means you’re the rough draft and I am the final draft.”
But in a way, he was right. I was the rough draft. As a kid, I developed all these problems that Kyle just didn’t have. I had a bad speech impediment for many years. I developed exercise induced asthma and would often black out trying to keep pace with Kyle in sports.
Most embarrassingly, I wet my bed until puberty, which wasn’t until I was 16 years old, three years later than Kyle. Until then, I was the smallest student in the entire high school. Every girl that I had a crush on seemed to pay no attention to me. They all, I felt, would rather date Kyle.
One time Kyle and I were at the weight lifting room where I had, of course, taken up obsessively lifting weights, trying to make myself bigger and more attractive, and I overheard a friend ask Jaime Handerson, who I had a crush on for two years, “Which of the twins do you think is cuter?”
Her response, “Well, Thom is cute, but Kyle is the ruggedly handsome one.”
That really hurt. That same year I went into a deep depression. I was diagnosed with OCD. I had a near suicide attempt and I was placed under anti-depressants. Even today, two decades later, it’s still really hard to talk about that period of my life.
But through all that, there is always one thing that I could do better than Kyle: Science. Science was my thing. It always came easy to me and I loved it. My senior year of high school, I won numerous science awards and scholarships. I was featured in the Oregonian about the work I did with injured wildlife, including a full front page photo of me holding this majestic golden eagle named Cabolero.
That was huge. I was finally being recognized for something that I could do better than my perfect final draft twin brother. I felt that I could finally contribute something unique to the world. I went on to college where I became a marine field ecologist and I started working in kelp forests, coral reefs and tide pools.
I co-authored my first peer reviewed publication and won every single grant and fellowship that I applied for. When I told my wife that fact, my perfect funding record -- my wife is a marine biologist -- I think that the words she used in response to that were “jack ass.”
Kyle and I drifted apart as he joined the coast guard to become a helicopter pilot. I applied for a course with SEA semester that involves sailing across the Pacific Ocean while conducting oceanographic research. It would be a dream-come true for me. And right before the course began, I found a pea-sized lump on my right testicle.
Within a week, I had three doctors’ appointments, a chest X-ray, a CT scan and an ultrasound. Lying there on the ultrasound table, my groin exposed, cold liquid jelly and ultrasound transmitter pressed against my scrotum, I felt more awkward and uncomfortable than I ever have in my entire life. The radiologist pointed to a spot on the screen, a colorful spot, and said, “The doppler shows increased blood flow to the lump. That’s probably a tumor. You have testicular cancer.”
A part of me knew that those words, “You have cancer,” should have scared the shit out of me. But they didn’t; I was numb. It was like I expected it, like everything I’d already been through in my life had prepared me for that. I asked the radiologist, “What happens next?” And he said, “You need to have that testicle removed right away.”
A week later, not knowing whether the tumor had metastasized, I left for Woods Hole Massachusetts with a very sore groin and an uncertain future. I began that course with SEA semester. My research partner, Steve Burton, started affectionately calling me ‘lefty’ in reference to my recent amputation. I experienced regular ghost pains. I don’t know if you are familiar with these, but that’s when a phantom, at random times during the day, kicks you in the nut that doesn’t exist anymore. You have to not act like you’ve just been kicked in the nut.
Midway through the course, my biopsy results came back. I had a Sertoli cell tumor. It was a type of testicular cancer that was so exceedingly rare in post-adolescent males, that I was apparently the 11th documented case. My urologist actually had to do a literature search to figure out what to do with me. It turns out that several of those previous cases had metastasized in a manner that couldn’t be detected with chest x-rays or CT-scans.
So that meant that I had to go back for another surgery, this time to remove all of my abdominal lymph nodes. When I heard that, I was devastated. The thought of going through a second surgery didn’t bother me one bit, but that meant that I wasn’t going to be able to sail across the Pacific Ocean with my class, who I had bonded with so closely during that time.
The next day, I went in front of my entire class and told them that I couldn’t sail with them, and they were just as devastated as I was. I finally felt that I had become a part of this community that truly accepted me for the first time in my life; that really cared about me.
Cancer actually made me feel care-free and confident in a strange way. I started to feel this sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt since before I was a teenager. I started doing things that my teenage self never would have done. My research partner Steve, and I, at the end of that course at Woods Hole, repainted the Pacific Equatorial current system across our bodies and in front of our entire class, we stripped down to our underwear to present our research proposal. Our class loved it! I had learned how to laugh and smile again. I had learned to find this happiness I hadn’t felt since before I was competitive with my twin.
Two weeks later, while my class was sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti, I woke from anesthesia to find that I had been cut open from sternum to pelvis. My abdomen was held together with 20 staples and my belly was distended to twice its normal size. The epidural had slipped out and the pain was absolutely excruciating. The doctors had literally disemboweled me, moving my digestive tract aside to access the lymph nodes along my inferior vena cava.
I was forced to fast for two weeks, no food or water while my stomach was pumped. I lost twenty pounds during that period. But I discovered the magic of a urinary catheter. There is always a silver lining, right?
One day Kyle came to the hospital. We hadn’t been together alone for several years. He sat down alongside my bed, his normally supremely confident self clearly shaken, and he asked me how I was doing. I wanted to act all stoic next to my twin, the Coast Guard helicopter pilot-to-be. I said, “I’m fine. I am just waiting for the biopsy results.”
Obviously, that was a lie. I probably looked like shit. I felt like shit and I was in the worst pain of my life, plus I was starving, I had no idea whether I would live long enough to fulfill my dream of becoming a marine ecologist. Meanwhile, my twin brother was in the midst of fulfilling his own dream of becoming a Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter pilot. But for the first time that I could ever remember, I didn’t feel competitive with him at all. I didn’t feel jealous.
What I felt more than anything else, more than the pain or the uncertainty for my future, was just really, really, fucking bored. I told Kyle that the worst thing about being in this situation was being stuck inside this whole time. I realized while I was in that hospital that what I really wanted for my life, what I really truly loved, wasn’t being better than Kyle at something, it wasn’t being the best scientist -- it was simply to be outside.
And then Kyle said something that caught me completely off guard. He asked me, “Do you know if the type of cancer you have is genetic?” He wasn’t just worried about whether his twin brother just might die from cancer. He was concerned about whether he could get it too. He had never before asked me if asthma was genetic, or bed wetting, or OCD, or depression, but faced with the prospect of such a serious illness at such a young age, he was really scared.
But for me, cancer was just another obstacle in the rough road of my life. I’d been the rough draft all of my life going through all this tough stuff that tested and blistered me over and over again, until I built up the callouses that allowed me to face cancer without a single fear, other than not having the opportunity to be outside again.
The biopsy results came back and the cancer, the tumor, had not metastasized; I was ecstatic. It was like I was given a second chance to learn how to be happy and to be myself, in my life. I went on to graduate school to study kelp forest ecology. I spent so many days under water and reveled in every incredible wildlife encounter in those amazing kelp forests.
But like every scientist, I spent the vast majority of my time in an office or a lab and that just reminded me of that hostile sterile room where I swore to myself that I would never again settle for something that made me unhappy. Here I was fulfilling my life dream of being a marine field ecologist, doing the one thing I believed I could do better than Kyle, and I wasn’t happy.
On a whim, I started an apprenticeship at an organic farm and I quickly grew to absolutely love the work. Then I realized that’s what I truly wanted, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be outside, getting dirty, growing food for my community. So standing there in my advisor’s office on the verge of leaving academia, I finally felt so confident because I knew who I really was. I finally knew what made me happy in life. Thank you.