ABOUT JENA CRISLER

Growing up in Prince George's County Maryland, I knew a security that most people would envy. My dad was a research chemist for the District of Columbia.

My first experience of real fear came my junior year of high school. Coming into the kitchen, I saw my mother furiously smoking. Afraid to ask what was happening, she looked at me with a deer in the headlights expression and said, "No one ever told me I would be the head of the household for a family of six!"

Yup, my dad lost his job. Then and there, I knew that I would never be financially dependent on another person. Scraping together grants, scholarships, and my own hard earnings from waitressing at Shoney's, I graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA anthropology and economics. I bounced around Washington without a clear career path for a few years

And because I still couldn't figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I took a job as a nanny in the south of France. Two years later, I yo-yoed home again, aged 28, competent in French with no clearer idea what I was going to do with my life.

My mother, who by this time was very sick with multiple sclerosis, not walking anymore, riding her electric scooter down the hall, smoking, and exasperated, yelled at me, "What are you going to do with your life?!?" Three days later, I decided to pursue the dream that was always percolating in the back of my mind.

I wanted to be a doctor. I started studying furiously, took the MCATs and was in by the next year. I graduated as a physician from Nova Southeastern College of Osteopathic Medicine and did my residency at Johns Hopkins program of internal Medicine at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.

Manic from exhaustion, I met the most wonderful man at the world at the most amazing party in all of Baltimore, Night of 100 Elvis's. He stuck around because the fun had begun and we've had 25 years which we are lucky enough to know is not long enough.

We decided to make our home in Virginia. Looking for a small cottage, we ended up buying a gorgeous money pit in the most amazing Village of Port Republic. I was one of the first in a new specialty of internal medicine, as a hospitalist at Rockingham Memorial Hospital starting in 2003. 

As my mother became sicker, I found a flexible job in Ocean City, Maryland, that allowed me to be with her as much as I needed to be and still support my own family.

I am truly alarmed at the daily headlines. My go-to policy for solving problems is just get started.  

Virginia needs a leader in the House of Delegates and I have the skills and desire to do it. I wear many hats, physician, caregiver, wife, Virginian, and now advocate for District 35.