Yesterday when Nancy Jaax came to speak, I was totally thrown off when I saw her. I think that because I had just read a novel about her and her husband, it made expect someone entirely different. The Hot Zone, and Richard Preston’s descriptions of her gave me this expectation that she was older than she was for whatever reason. But in reality she actually looks much like any other middle-class-citizen. It really helped me understand that the real heroes of today look just like you and I.
She had a lot to share. Her whole speech was so intriguing; you couldn’t help but listen so intently. She ended up being just as faithful to science and health as the book led me to believe she was. One of the things I found interesting, was how she kind of acted as if what she did wasn’t all that big of a deal. I figured that with all she had gone through at the Reston Monkey House, she would have been less motivated to share her memories with us as much as she did, but instead she seemed happy to spread knowledge of the importance of keeping yourself healthy.
She was even somewhat humorous about most of the stuff she brought up during her talk. With some of her descriptions of the diseases and simply how they looked in picture. She kind of had a whole artistic way of putting things. Nancy and her husband had to thing’s most of us would never dream of doing. She had to cut open animals and extract their internal organs, she saw people collapse to the ground, unknowledgeable of whether they were sick with Ebola or the flu, she witnessed multiple cases of people losing their minds due to the extreme stress of the importance and conditions of their job.
The different things she and her husband Jerry were subject to well… It was unlikely to me that she would have been able to leave all of that without some kind of Post-Traumatic-Stress. To put it lightly, she is indeed a strong woman.
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