Growing up, much like everyone else, my parents always wanted me to become a doctor. I used to get so frustrated with them because I felt as though they were trying to influence me in a direction that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. However, once I hit the 8th grade, my outlook quickly changed.
Before I started the 8th grade, my grandfather (Pap) was diagnosed with Stage 2 Lung Cancer and began to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments. After months of these treatments, we got the great news that he finally went into remission and we were all so thrilled. I can’t even begin to explain what a relief it was to hear those words.
However, a few months later he started to feel sick again and went back the Oncologist. I remember waiting for him and my grandmother to come home from his appointment that day to see if he was okay. After a long wait, they finally came home and I asked them how it went. Their response was not the words that anybody wanted to hear. From the previous chemotherapy and radiation treatments, he had developed Leukemia and was told that he only had two weeks to live. Despite this horrible news and all that he had been through, he never let it phase him, and he was always so optimistic and happy. In those last two weeks, him and I shared a moment that still sticks with me to this day: As we were sitting at the kitchen table talking, he told me how he had just donated money to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital because he didn’t want to see kids have to go through what he went through, and that really hit me. He unfortunately passed away a few days after this conversation.
Although this was such a tragic loss, I don’t tend to think of it that way anymore. I think of it as an opportunity for me to be able to fulfill his dream and help children in need. I am not a science person, and I never have been, but because of him and because of that one moment, I now know that I want to become either a general pediatrician or a Pediatric Oncologist. I want him to look down on me and be proud of the person that I have become since the 8th grade.