Then her lingering symptoms prevented her from working as much as she needed to, and she lost her job in 2021. She barely saw her children, then 6 and 3, until she caught Covid in October 2020. She and her colleagues volunteered to cover shifts in the emergency room, and she was working more days than ever. When the Covid pandemic descended, she went all in on her job because she felt it was the right thing to do in a public health emergency. Part of the desire for a move was lifestyle she felt the demands of her job in Minnesota didn’t give her enough time for her family, so she wanted to move into private practice.Įxtra time with her family didn’t happen, either. After some time in Minnesota and another house that was a bear to sell, her family, which now included two children, finally settled in Delaware in 2019. Dunham began her career as an OB-GYN with over $250,000 of educational debt, even though she went to a public university for medical school. He also lost his job during that economic slump.ĭr. “What was supposed to be a decent asset for us was suddenly a millstone,” she shared. Her husband, a software engineer, bought a house in the Tampa Bay area in 2006, which lost half its value in the 2008 recession. Instead, the cascading crises of the next decades thwarted her at every turn. Dunham, a wry Maryland native whom I spoke with over video chat in early January, told me that this unexpected financial crisis inspired her to get it together - to seek out a stable career (medicine), to get married early (in her 20s) and to make the sort of choices she thought would disaster-proof her life. The family was suddenly faced with anxiety about paying for school, retirement and their mortgage. Dunham was leaving for college in 2001, her mother lost her job of 20 years in that year’s recession. Caitlin Dunham will be 40 this year, and she’s been grasping for security her entire adult life.
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