It's five a.m. It was our landline that rang and it's beside the bed. You know, you think

it's maybe something wrong with one of your kids or something like. So then they said please stay on the line for a very important call from

Sweden. And I was just sort of grabbing my husband going, oh my God, it's five in the morning, it's October 2nd, it's a call from Sweden.

This has to be the Nobel Prize.

What else could it be?

But then the line went quiet.

Donna Strickland waited.

But I stayed on the line because they told me to stay on the line.

And waited.

Finally after 15 minutes, I said, okay, there's something not right.

And so then I checked my email and it said, please call us. We are trying to get through to you.

You know, the email came from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.

So I was pretty sure that I knew what was happening.

So I had a call to Sweden to find out that yes indeed I won the Nobel Prize.

It was for Donna Strickland's work on ultra-short high intensity laser pulses, something she got into when she arrived in the physics department of New York State's Rochester University as a PhD student in the 1980s.

It was just this really cool lab that had green lasers pumping a red laser and you just walked in and thought wow how exciting is this?

It was in that cool lab that

donna and colleagues did their groundbreaking work which would go on to be used in corrective eye surgery

and be recognized years later with the Nobel Prize in physics. That comes with a check for 9 million Swedish Krona that's about

a million US dollars and a week of the grandest festivities in Stockholm involving some very posh dinners.

I was sitting between a prince and a king. They came around with the potatoes and just stood there

and I didn't know what was happening and one of them

...