You're working the night shift as a barista as you try to get your freelance medical writing career off the ground. Yearly income, so far, is at poverty level.

You land a gig as a blogger for an online health information newsletter. Your income has inched up a bit, but your editor is driving you to drink (and it's not coffee).

You've moved into the land of steady employment. You're the junior medical writer at a Big Pharma company, and you're decoding and writing up biostats on genomes. And you can actually pay your rent on time, now that you're making a living wage.

Enough of the pure science—you moved into the marketing and advertising wing of Big Pharma, and you're chief communicator on a new category of drugs that work wonders (but have some pesky side effects).

You're in bliss. You quit Big Pharma to follow your bliss as a fiction writer. You're now the chief writer for a hit TV show about ER docs, and your movie script about the storm and stress of medical writing was optioned for big, big bucks. Now the coffee's on you.