Personal Narrative: My Journey To Medical School

Gathered around the cadaver, a TA starts taking out body parts like it’s nothing. She gives one student a knee, another a lung, and finally she presents a third student the heart. Each piece of the human body is passed around from student to student as the TA talks about each when at last the student next to me gently passes along a human heart. For some reason I wasn't scared, I simply felt a sense of wonderment, as I was holding what used to be someone’s life in my very own hands. It was the most beautiful thing my hands had held, and it was that summer that I knew what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life; however, my journey to medical school started long before I was aware. When I recently asked my parents when they knew I’d one …show more content…
Without thinking twice, my parents rearranged their lives to take care of him. Owning their own business then, my dad took on endless hours of work while my mom spent all day with my grandpa - ushering him from one doctor’s visit to the next, making him homemade meals, and helping him keep up his house. Eventually, cancer, the radiation, and the chemo made him too sick to stay at home, so he moved into a nursing facility. Because his own family couldn’t be with him, my parents continued to spend daily with him, and in turn, I did as well. My parents took it upon themselves to do everything they could to make his life easier and more comfortable. They laughed with him, helped him through his pain and they happily listened to him reminisce about his own patients, you see, he was a respected and beloved 80-year-old neurologist. I spent that summer playing my viola for him and graciously sharing his daily Banana Pie Blizzard. I watched my mom and dad shared their gifts of compassion and companionship with him until his last day and I tried to do the same. It was only at his funeral, did I witness just how many lives he had profoundly touched with his own compassion and