It is one challenge to die for the someone else’s sake. It is an entirely different feat to live for someone else. In a society, a planet, stirred by self-interest, this is a life rarely found, someone who lives to serve. In the past five years of my life, a time when I consider myself to have been awake, becoming more intensely aware of this reality of living with purpose, I have long thought on this life and its meaning.

            Seven years ago, I lost my first patient. He was run down by a car before 30 kids and their parents, soaking the street with crimson in a matter of seconds. In the bed of the truck that sped like an ambulance towards the veterinary hospital, I found myself unable to do anything for the limp puppy in my arms. Trying to stifle his bleeding with a spare shirt and singing soothingly with what strength my tears left me, I found myself confronting my worst fear: Being unable to at all alleviate suffering, helpless to help.

            That day, God clubbed me upside the head with an inescapable fact of my life that I’ll never forget. I can seek no greater purpose than to combat this fear in me with every fiber of my being. Before my light from this world is extinguished and my time here ends, I have roughly 80 years, assuming all goes well, to work with. The meaning of my life, when it ends, should not leave me when I’m done with this time I’ve been given, but remain in every little thing I’ve given myself to. Maybe I gave my life, maybe I died, for someone else’s sake, or maybe God called me home early, but my time here should testify that I lived to serve.

 

            For all the unstoppable passion this stirs in me every time I look back, my ability to help, my countermeasure against my fears, will entirely be determined by my commitment to living every day in the pursuit of this ability. I have to train. Even the storybook heroes that I’ve long adored, Weber’s Honor Harrington, Card’s Ender Wiggin, Ringo’s Michael O’Neal, spent countless hours in training before being able to perform their fictional acts of passion. Undeterred focus, mental endurance, and undeniable skill only come when sought out, rendering me at the beginning of my journey, burning the midnight oil and tipping my hat to a groggy morning rooster.

            In order to meet this challenge in its wholesome entirety, I have committed not simply to education as a medical prerequisite, but to growth and experience through struggle. As a student of Biomedical Engineering, I will be pushed in ways uncommon to non-E STEM majors. Teamwork, leadership, and organized direction form the spearhead of the engineering field, and in order to excel to medical performance levels, I’ll need to be at its point. In conjunction with employment as an Emergency Medical Technician and active involvement volunteering with Traditions Hospice Care clinic, these challenges have left little wiggle room for faltering steps.

            Starting off in freshman year engineering, I found myself for the first time drastically out of my element with a favorite pastime of mine: Legos. What to me was a child’s plaything and the constructionally curious adult’s intrigue was to the engineering program, a way to weather the incoming freshman to the process of bringing a project from concept to fruition. As it required teamwork, coordination, programming, and conceptualization, it was the perfect amalgamate of different fields and a challenge to behold. In this time, I taught myself how to encode analytical processes, coordinated team efforts, and adhered to my passion for positivity when demonstrations went awry. Within the engineering field, the permutation of logic-based problem solving and undeterred commitment to finding solutions always accompanies the best of members. This skill is paramount in the use of medical knowledge to combat disease, trauma, and pain.

            Amidst this constant academic pursuit, my path is riddled with seized opportunities to grow. There is truth in the AMSA mantra, “It takes more than Medical school to make a physician,” so by making use of my EMT-B certification, I have sought to take direct steps towards countering that fateful day seven years ago. Beneath flashing lights and emergency sirens, any situation requires the best of one’s attention, leaving the man without grace under pressure sadly out-of-place. Without rapid & effective medical assessment and triage, patient outcomes take a nosedive. Early on exposure, having taking into account the gravity of such a responsibility, permits rare experience face-to-face with my purpose. The heart and hands with the love and skill, in a time of darkness and pain in a patient’s life, can be that difference between life and death. I can love people through my ability to meet these needs, to fulfill and earn these skills.

            This journey is far from over. By the time I am able to call myself Doctor, the ground I will have covered will be the difference between boy and man, student and teacher, the served and the servant. I’ll not be shaken from this intent lest God show my path to be different; my ultimate intent with loving and healing people by my words, my knowledge, my hands and my heart.