The scrapbook that my mother kept through my elementary and high school years, titled "Shannon's School Days," has pre-printed blanks to fill in friends, teachers, hobbies, and a section each year titled "When I grow up I want to be."
This section in my first grade year has a check in the box marked "Nurse." By the next year, apparently God had convinced me of what He already knew, which is that I am not nearly patient enough to be a nurse, and the box is marked "Doctor."
This box stays marked throughout elementary school and junior high. At some point in high school I decided, for reasons that I can't remember, to abandon medicine in favor of a pure research career. By the time I was in college, the plan was to get a Ph.D in the biosciences and live happily ever after in the lab.
May of 1999 changed this plan. Suddenly and inexplicably I became interested again in medicine. Never one to be unambitious, I immediately enrolled in an MCAT course and attempted to fix my GPA. Even then, though, I don't think I had any idea that I'd ever be doing surgery. After all, there was no box in the scrapbook for "surgeon." There should have been one.
1 comment:
Remember for a brief time when you wanted to be Michael Crichton?
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