I got a "B" in Genetics and Gene Expression during Spring quarter, so I was happy to find out when checking my grades that I still made Dean's Honor List Spring 2016 (top 16% in my college), AND I managed to get an "A" in my final course of calculus EVER! Good riddance, calculus! I am still keeping the dream alive of being able to graduate "summa cum laude," but I would happily take magna, and above all will at least be earning "I gave it my all." I get reminded on occasion that I was the first person in our family to make it past organic chemistry in college, and there was a lot of crying when it was discovered that I not only passed, but got an "A". Anyways, maybe this is because I love school (evidenced by the fact that I've already purchased and started reading all of my Fall quarter books for fun [Latin especially!]), so it's not really been so terrible... the start of Fall quarter seems so impossibly far away!
This excitement of course is all balanced with some recent sobering health news about a close family member (details about which I will respectfully decline to share). And a humbling MCAT practice exam. Even though I've been reading all about surgery, and have done some time in the OR, the thing about medicine is that every procedure, no matter how "common" or "routine" to health professionals, is at once being experienced by a patient for the first time. "Recommended to neurosurgeon for consult" is not in the day-to-day vernacular of the average person, and this is precisely when doctoring is the most crucial: when your medical experience and training are second to your compassion, empathy, and ability to connect to someone who's has just received news that their life will never be the same.
This ties in with what has been keeping me awake the last few nights, thinking about my family member, and the question, "Why do you want to become a doctor?". A question every aspiring medical student should expect to answer, but one that for me does not come with an easy answer like, "my parents want me to," or "I've always wanted to be a doctor" (the two I hear most commonly).
One day I will be ready to talk about what it is that made me want to become a doctor in more detail, but for now, I can see the moment clearly, I can look back and see myself as if from above, disoriented, on a crisp foggy night, rummaging to unhook my bag as my phone rang, muffled.
"Emma..."
the pause,
"Emma, we need you to come to the hospital..."
I hear a shallow exhale buffeting against the phone in the silence,
"...are you sitting down?"
This was the first of many calls, which over the next few years would extract me straight from my youth and throw me at the feet of mortality. A grey world where for the first time in my life, I would hold the hand of someone I loved, helpless to do anything else while I watched them pass away.
