Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/980339
t m c » p u l s e | m a y 2 0 1 8 10 " You don't realize your mom is wise until you're older. Through my years in medical school and looking back over my life, my mom always told me, 'If you start something, you have to finish it. If you made a commitment, you need to honor it.' But the best advice was, 'You're going to have failure in life, and you will be defined by how you handle adversity.' I see my mom now—she's so successful, at the top of her career as an anesthesiologist. But she remembers failing her biochem test in medical school. She took a day to cry, but afterwards she took the test over again and got an A. Most people don't discuss their failures in life, especially when they've made it. But my mom is never afraid to talk about the bumps in the road. " — BOBBI PORCHE May 2018 graduate of McGovern Medical School at UTHealth " My mother was incredibly supportive in anything I ever wanted to do. When this picture was taken, I was this nerdy little kid that used to run down to a brook near our house and I would bring up water and look at it under a microscope. One of the things my parents did for me was I really wanted a high-quality microscope and they were willing to make that investment. And so I wound up setting up a laboratory in my room in my home in West Hartford, Connecticut. But then when the smell started to get bad from all the pond scum, they asked me to move the lab down to the basement. My mother is now almost 90 and she lives in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and her most important words for me growing up were, 'All you can do is your best.' And those were always comforting words for me, to know that that is all a person can do in the end, and generally speaking, if people always try to do their best, they'll come out ahead of the game. " — PETER HOTEZ, M.D., PH.D. Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, endowed chair in Tropical Pediatrics at Texas Children's Hospital and director of Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development Hotez at age 9, with his sister, Liz, and mother, Jean Hotez, in 1967. Porche plans to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Vivian Porche, M.D., and become an anesthesiologist. Credit: UTHealth, Maricruz Kwon Mothers are the "first ladies" of our lives. They've known us longer than anyone and dispensed a wealth of wisdom along the way. In honor of Mother's Day, Pulse asked members of the Texas Medical Center community: What's the best advice your mother ever gave you? MOTHER KNOWS BEST