A lot of people seem to choose their career path based on what they see in movies or television shows, or even what they see some of their family members doing. Common answers from kids are teachers, astronauts, and police officers. For me, the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was obvious at a very young age. I based my answer on experiences that happened to me by saying “I want to be a doctor and help people feel better.”
From the time I was a baby, I always had ear troubles, getting ear infections like crazy. Like most kids with ear troubles, I had tubes put in my ears to help drain the infections that weren’t draining on their own. The tubes are supposed to fall out on their own over time and while the left one did, the right one never fell out. My pediatrician yanked the tube out of my ear, which had left a hole in my ear drum. Worried that I would lose hearing in my right ear, I had surgery done at CHOP to try and close the hole. Unfortunately, that surgery failed, and I had to have a second surgery done. Again, that surgery also failed. This began to leave my parents and I frustrated, as I was missing a whole lot of school all before the age of ten. Finally, my parents decided to take me to a different hospital, St. Christopher’s, to have my third surgery. While in surgery, my doctor found that I was missing the second out of three bones that are connected to the eardrum, known as the anvil, making him place a metal ball bearing to act as a prosthetic. He also covered the hole in my ear! But, although that was all well and good, due to all the work that was done on my ear and scar tissue, I became completely deaf in my right ear by the age of ten.
Now this may seem like a sad story, which it is, but there was a lot of good that came out of it. By this time, I was heading into middle school and starting to really think about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I knew that I wanted to become a doctor and help people before they had to go through what I went to. I went back and forth for a while on which doctor, I wanted to be, starting with an otolaryngologist, otherwise known as an ear, nose, and throat doctor since I already knew a lot about ears from my experiences. I then started to ponder if that was the route that I wanted to take and thought about being a pediatrician. Besides the one that yanked the tube out of my ear all those years ago, the rest of the pediatricians at the practice I have been going to for my whole life are all amazing people who inspired me to help kids, whom I love to be around. I was stuck on the idea of being a pediatrician for a long time but recently, I started to like the idea of becoming an OBGYN. I feel that forming that special connection with your patients and their parents from a very early age is so special. All of these decisions, whether they came at the easiest times or not, ultimately led me to Thomas Jefferson University, the start of pursuing my dreams.