how I Realized Medicine Was for Me
‘Doctor.’ I said when asked by my aunt, what I wanted to be in the future. While at the time I was only seven, I would never imagine how much that word stuck to me. Ever since I was little, I remember watching shows like Untold Stories of the ER and Bizarre ER with my mom, while not the most appropriate for younger viewers, it always captivated me and sparked an interest in me. It has always been my dream career without a doubt, and I will work hard to prove that I can do it and even though the odds are against me, and there is a system in place where I am not wanted. If other women have done it, so can I.
I was sitting in front of my guidance counselor, my end freshman year of high school, and he asked me ‘what do you want your major to be?’ It was either an agricultural, law, art, music or a sports medicine major. Without a doubt, I said ‘sports medicine would be great’. I didn’t really know what sports medicine meant, I just knew what medicine was, and that I was interested in it.
Flash forward a couple of months and I get a schedule with a class called nutrition science. Interesting, something I had never seen in school before. Even though it was first period, and at 7:40 in the morning, I always felt eager to attend this class, at times I was one of the few people there. While it was an interesting class due to its fun projects, I learned a lot of things about nutrition and medicine, subjects that I have always been interested in.
It was Monday morning a few weeks before winter break, when my teacher announced that we were starting a new project. This project was labeling the heart and writing the flow of blood throughout the heart. This was a fun project for me, first we got to draw the heart, and secondly, we really got to understand how the heart pumped blood. This is one of my first instances, where I really realized, ‘Oh wow, I really want to continue learning more about this’. For me biology and science has always come easy, and I have never once found it boring. This simple assignment was a steppingstone to me realizing that It’s what I want to continue to study in college.
My second semester of my junior year of high school, I was giving this class called first aid and CPR. Obviously, I was very excited about this class, even though it was going to be given online. We learned about all these different life saving techniques, it was useful, and interesting. We learned how to treat a variety of cold and heat illnesses from frostbite to heat stroke.We also learned how to save somebody from choking, we learned how to give CPR to people of all ages. I consumed this knowledge like it was nothing. You would think that these emergencies never occurred to you or other people you knew, but one day it happened, an emergency occurred. I was eating dinner when one of my family members started to choke on their food. I reacted and immediately started to help. Step 1, ask if they’re choking, step 2, give 5 back blows on the back, since that didn’t work, step 3, do the Heimlich. The Heimlich involves putting your hand into a fist hugging them and pressing down underneath their rib cage. I repeated this movement for about two to three times, until they stopped choking. Oh god I thought it could’ve been worse. While I always watched these types of emergencies on the tv, I never imagined it would happen, to see it in real life, or that I would be in the helping hand of things. While it is a scary situation, and a person’s life is in danger, I realized that in the future I would like to assist people with these types of situations and would like to learn more about this.
While emergency medicine and science are a clear passion of mine. Since the pandemic, I’ve learned more about the injustices that go on in medicine. People of color have higher death Covid-19 death rates than the white counter point, not because of low vaccination rates, but because it has been documented that white people receive better medical treatment when it comes to emergencies. It doesn’t even stop there; a lot of modern medicine is based upon prejudices. While many think that it doesn’t affect them, it does. And upon reflection I’ve realized that other people around me has experienced this very obvious discrimination. One story that I can recall, for example, is one time when somebody in my family visited the doctors due to extreme body pain and weakness. The doctors had dismissed them and told them that it was due to stress in the household, it wasn’t until they switched doctors, and many exams later, that they discovered that they have fibromyalgia, the cause of the condition is unknown, but extremely painful. The story does not stop there, later, another doctor had suggested losing weight, as it might be putting pressure on their skeletal system. Once they had lost about 80 pounds, this person waited around for about two years, and nothing had occurred, they still had excruciating pain. It took multiple opinions for them to get the help of a pain specialist that finally took them seriously. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that they were; A at first they were dismissed because they were female, but B, they were also discriminated against later on due to fat phobia, in the medical community.
So why do I want to become a doctor, because I want to change the injustices that occur not only in people of color, but women, and even the queer community. While it may seem like an impossible task, one person can create a lot of change. While being a doctor is cool because you get to work with the human body, it is not only about the body part that is cool to me, but also the fact that you’re dealing with a person as a whole, and you as a doctor can affect a person’s life as a whole.
