A New Life:From ophthalmologist to musician, Lisa Hake makes an eye-opening career move, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
It isn't very often that an ophthalmologist gives up their sure-fire career for the rather shakier remit of the singer-songwriter scene. And when that ophthalmologist transfers from sunny California to Ireland's east coast, you also have to wonder has the constant exposure to the Californian sun affected their decision-making process.
Lisa Hake has heard it all before, however. She is not suffering from sun stroke, she maintains, but rather scratching an itch that has been bothering her for some time. She and her husband moved from Sonoma County, California to Blackrock, Co Louth in February 2006, to achieve what many people are aiming for these days: life balance, work satisfaction.
"Once I got into medicine," says Hake, "I knew I wanted to be a surgeon. Eye surgery is a great thing for a woman to do as a surgeon. A lot of people have a thing about eyes in that they find the idea of them hard to handle, but they're actually a lovely part of the body.
"You wouldn't want to show me a lot of blood because that's not what I'm used to, but everything about the eye is beautiful, and they're good for small hands. The surgery is very delicate, precise.
"At one point in my studies I had wanted to go into neurology, but a neurologist took me aside once and he said that if he had it to do over again he would have gone to ophthalmology - you can cure people, he said, make them better, whereas a lot of his job was diagnosis."
Hake's interest in medicine didn't come from her family, she says. "My parents didn't like doctors. They didn't want me to do medicine school, either; they thought it was a very uncreative area of work to do. As a child I picked a microscope for a Christmas present from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue - my parents were dismayed!"
Her interest in music, however, came from her parents. She recalls her father dancing to the likes of Pink Floyd, while her mother liked to sing along to people such as Kris Kristofferson. "I started to take piano lessons, but didn't really like it. Then I went away to a writer's camp and heard someone singing Mr Bojangles. That was a defining moment - I had to have a guitar."
The transfer from eye surgery to analysing emotions through song was a slow one. Hake says she tired of telling friends and colleagues she was planning to record an album, and after a while they stopped asking her about it because it was so long overdue.
"With my work schedule it just wasn't possible," she says. "My husband suggested we take a work sabbatical, but where I worked there was no such thing. It took me a couple of years for such a suggestion to be convenient for them to let me go."
The sabbatical finished officially in the summer of 2006, which means that Hake's job is long gone. "I left, there was nothing written, just a handshake with the implication that they'd see me back on the job on August 31st, 2006; that I'd step off a plane and be on call that night. It didn't happen."
Since Hake has been in Ireland, she has found that she occasionally misses her former career. "The part of me that yearns to work with people in a healing way is something I'm not fulfilling.
"It's an incredible privilege to be a doctor. Think about the things we trust strangers to do for us and kind of take for granted: they cut our hair, clean our teeth, and so on.
"You give yourself over to them in a very intimate exchange. At
the end of the day, it's a great thing to be able to do."
The difference between her old job and her new one is the realisation that a different kind of trust applies. "Instead of people trusting me with their eyes, they now trust me with their ears - and in some cases their emotions. And you have to be together in the same way - very organised, with your capo and your tunings.
"Despite the view that musicians are unstructured, you have to be very precise."
And how is the singer-songwriter work going so far? Success, implies Hake, depends on how prolific she is and how good the songs she's writing are. She is still in the process of immersing herself in the musical community, in which she has made many friends.
"I would love to be busier," she says, "and would love to support someone on tour. That element of it I haven't fully experienced, but I've found that pretty much everyone I've met along the way has been enormously friendly and helpful."
A highlight this year was the release of her debut CD, while a follow-up is planned for release in 2008. What happens in between is anyone's guess. "A big part of all this for me was figuring out what story I wanted to tell at the end of my life. I knew the end of the surgeon's story, but this is a much more interesting one, and I would have been disappointed in me if I didn't try it.
"Will it work out? It doesn't really matter - life doesn't work out all the time, it's all about the experience. So far this has been a great experience that I wouldn't trade for anything."