On my first day of medical school, my father, a dentist, told me he’d just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Cancer had crept back into my life — except this time not into my body.
At age 12, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an aggressive surgery, I was tumor-free for 10 years. Then, at 23, I received the news of an inoperable recurrence.
While going through radiation and chemotherapy, I struggled with how to move forward in the face of endless uncertainty — until I realized that, with or without cancer, everyone lives with uncertainty. Since I never knew what the next day would bring, I decided that the most important thing wasn’t where I wanted to be in 10, 15 or 20 years but how I wanted to live now, in the present. So I applied to medical school.
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