Medical Monday: Link-Up!

Today, I will be linking up with a few of my favorite bloggers over at Your Doctor's Wife and From A Doctor's Wife.

As a fourth year medical student, it may be easy to forget what exactly drew you to medicine in the first place. As I fill in my paperwork/CV/Personal Statements/Requests for Letters of Rec/etc etc etc for my residency applications, I am finding myself trying to make some sense of how I have evolved into who I am today from the girl I was when I entered Medical School three long years ago.

I was drawn to medicine in a fashion likely similar to most people: I have an innate, deep desire to help people. Generic, I know, but I have come across a few medical professionals who I sincerely question this seemingly ordinary characteristic's validity. I discovered this need to help others while a nursing aide at an extended care facility. Helping others with such seemingly mundane tasks - such as eating dinner, combing hair, brushing teeth - fulfilled a part of me that I didn't realize was previously empty. Hearing the stories from times past, joking around to put a smile on another's face, learning invaluable life lessons from those with long-term perspective - I absolutely loved it. So I decided to enter into medical school, knowing that there could be nothing else in the world that would make me as happy as serving others as a physician.

During the second week of my first year as a medical student (a few days after my very first exam), my mom called to tell me that my cousin had been diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer. This disease has a long history in my family, having claimed the young lives of my grandmother and aunt. As a medical student, having a small grasp of what that diagnosis truly means, I feared the grave reality of the unfortunate diagnosis. As I continued life as a medical student, my cousin's diagnosis never strayed far from my mind, and I had an inclination that I would someday pursue work in the world of oncology. Cancer has impacted my personal life, and I have always found it frighteningly fascinating. In fact, my 8th grade science-fair project involving the effects of beta carotene on the growth of cancer had foreshadowed the inevitable development of my career. I have taken courses such as molecular genetics and cancer biology in an attempt to better understand the intricate disaster of life gone awry, of the morphology of the deranged cellular replication cycle which causes uncontrollable and insatiable growth of particular cell lineages which we lump into the broadly encompassing term of "cancer".

As chance would have it, my second rotation of third year was surgical oncology. This was when I discovered that the inclination of my desire to work in the world of oncology became an obviously clear choice of work for me. I knew that I was drawn to the mechanisms of cancer, of the complexities of such derangement in normal human function, but it wasn't until this clerkship that I discovered that I also really and truly love the patients. I'm not sure if it's because of my personal connections with cancer, my sincere interest in cancer, or if it is because the patients are strikingly different to those cared for in other services, all I know is that I enjoy the opportunity to participate in their care, to somehow assist them in their battle against cancer.

The final portion of my progression during medical school will finish in June of 2013. Undoubtedly, I will continue to grow through this year of training, and solidify the decision to pursue a career in medical oncology.