The Medical Fields Impact by Lauren

The Medical Fields Impact by Lauren - November 2023 Scholarship Essay

When I was a kid, I never really thought I would want to be in the medical field. It was a lot of responsibility, and I feared hurting people more than I could help. I always heard of people who had some experience with someone or some event in their life in the medical world and that’s what sparked their interest and I always thought it was crazy and that there was no way something negative like going to the doctors, or the hospital could end up in such a positive thing.
When I was fourteen, I got sick in the middle of the COVID19 pandemic. For weeks we thought I had a bad case of covid, no matter how many negative tests results I got. Since we were in a pandemic, we needed to make sure going to the hospital or getting checked out was truly worth it due to limited resources and the danger of going to these high risk environments unnecessarily. Eventually I was so sick we decided it was worth the risk and three days before my fifteenth birthday I was admitted to St. Johns pediatric hospital, and there we found out I was at risk of cardiac arrest due to malnutrition, and I have never been more scared. While I was in the hospital all the staff were so supportive and they listened to all my symptoms and fears.
On my fifteenth birthday, in the middle of a pandemic, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. I thought Crohn's disease diagnosis was the end of my life as I knew it and I would never make it past the worst of it. While I was digesting this news and thinking of all the ways my life would be different and over, a pharmacist with Crohn's disease came up and explained her story and while it wasn’t the exact thing I was going through, she helped me understand that if I take care of myself and understand the things medicine can do, my life will be affected very little. This pharmacist is the reason I chose to look on the bright side of life and why I decided to make the best of it and better myself.
This disease has shown me the magic of today's modern medicine and I decided to go to school to become a pediatric pharmacist and maybe I will be lucky enough to make a difference in some struggling child's life like that pharmacist did for me. I owe my life to modern day medicine, and I wouldn’t change anything about my life or health journey.