Grandma’s biscuits - Duke - Medical school admissions essay help
Medical school admissions essay help
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a chef, which is interesting because I am a terrible cook. I can follow a recipe easily enough, but attempting to create something new and experimenting with recipes usually led, and continues to lead, to disaster. I used to have this fake oven I would use to pretend to make green eggs and ham with coffee for breakfast for my parents. When I got tired of cooking fake meals, I started asking to help cook with my parents. They bought me a kid friendly knife and assigned me to chopping duty. No matter how much they explained it to me, I was always slow. None of my chopped vegetables turned out evenly diced, and they ended up taking over. I wanted to be a chef because of how food made me feel. If I walked inside after playing in the cold, a hot bowl of my dad’s gumbo would warm me to my bones and provide a sort of contentment that only hot food in the belly can. If I came home from a terrible day at school, my mom’s macaroni and cheese would cheer me right up, making me forget whatever inconsequential thing had me upset. I wanted to be able to provide my experience with food to others. I wanted to be able to help people feel great on a good day, or make their bad days just a tad bit more bearable.
But as I was beginning to realize that my ingenuity in the kitchen would lead to a downhill career in the food industry, my grandma moved in with my family. She had Alzheimer’s, and it was incredibly difficult witnessing her gradual loss of self. It was hard hearing her ask me the same questions over and over again. She would ask where she was, and when I would tell her she was at her son Morgan’s house, her next question would always be, “Who’s Morgan?” It broke my heart that she could not remember her son’s name, her grandchildren, and that her husband had died years ago. She would take pills on top of pills, go to the doctor week after week, and I always wondered why she was not getting better. She gradually declined over the years, and had to be moved to a nursing home. Her condition continued to decline until she was hospitalized and died a few days later, nothing but a shell of the grandma I had known as a child.
My grandma’s sickness taught me a lot about my own ability to love others. It was a time of growth for me, as I had to learn how to love someone when all they seem to do is take and take and take from you. The questions and the worry from my grandma were non-stop, which is understandable due to her condition, but I would find myself getting frustrated and annoyed. There were times when I considered hiding so she would not be able to bother me. But something I always remember hearing is that love is not a feeling, it is an attitude. It is a constant choice to value another person. My disgust with Alzheimer’s was intertwining with the love I had for my grandmother, love that I so easily based on her ability to make me her famous biscuits or tea cakes. I had to learn to love my grandma as she was and not who she used to be, realizing that she was worthy of my love just because she exists.
This experience also raised philosophical questions. How can a person live well while having a disease that robs them of themselves? What does it even mean to live well? I do not have a perfect answer to these questions, but I think one aspect of living well is the ability to form and maintain loving relationships with others. But it was almost impossible for my grandmother to form and maintain relationships as a result of her Alzheimer’s. I do not think it is possible to forget how to love, but it becomes hard to focus on and grow in love with others if you live in constant pain and worry. And I thought about the countless people living in pain, taking pills, hoping for the best, struggling to continue to live well in spite of illnesses that work to take so much from them. And I realized that I want to help them, and for my help to come through medicine.
Some years later I had the opportunity to volunteer in a health center situated in a very poor neighborhood in the D.R. This involved assisting Dora, the head nurse, as she did medical consultations and distributed medicine to members of the community. People were living amongst human waste and trash with a wide variety of diseases and had no access to potable water. I learned from Dora that healthcare should be more than just diagnosing and treating illness. It is fighting for the health of people holistically and for basic human rights. It is fighting for access to clean water, to bring awareness to illnesses that are being ignored, to bring healthcare to those society casts off as worthless. It is fighting to improve the lives of the most underserved, whether that be within the United States or outside of it. It got me interested in global health and organizations like MSF who are working to improve the lives of the most needy, to improve, in a way, their ability to form and develop loving relationships with others.
While being a chef would undoubtedly allow me to briefly touch the lives of others, I want to become a physician because it will allow me to work and be with people in the bleakest, most touching moments of their lives, perhaps making their bad days a tad more bearable, just like food does for me.