What Good is Care Without Compassion? :: Medicine College Admissions Essays

What Good is Care Without Compassion?   The AIDS hospice reeked from unhealthiness and neglect. On my first mean solar solar day there, after an hour of training, I met Paul, a tall, emaciated, forty-year-old AIDS victim who was recovering from a stroke that had severely abnormal his speech. I took him to General Hospital for a long-overdue appointment. It had been weeks since he had been outside. After wait for two and a half hours, he was called in and then take to wait another two hours for his prescription. Hungry, I suggested we go and get roughly lunch. At first Paul resisted he didnt want to accept the lunch offer. Estranged from his family and seemingly ignored by his friends, he wasnt used to anyone be kind to him - even though I was only talking intimately a Big Mac. When it arrived, Paul took his first bite. Suddenly, his face lit up with the biggest, most radiant smile. He was on top of the world because someone bought him a hamburger. Amazing. So little b ought so much. While elated that I had literally made Pauls day, the neglect and emotional isolation from which he suffered excite me. This was a harsh side of medicine I had not seen before. properly then and there, I wondered, Do I really want to go into medicine?   What had so upset me about my day with Paul? ahead then nothing in my personal, academic, or volunteer experiences had shaken my resolved commitment to medicine. Why was I so unprepared for what I saying? Was it the proximity of death, knowing Paul was terminal? No it couldnt have been. As a young boy in gutted Beirut I had see death time and time again. Was it the financial hardship of the hospice residents, the living from day to day? No, I dealt with that myself as a new immigrant and had even worked full-time during my first two years of college. Financial difficulty was no crazy to me. Neither financial distress nor the sight of death had deterred me. Before the day in the hospice, I only wanted to be a doctor.   My sake in medicine had started out with an enjoyment of science. From general biology to sophisticated cellular/behavioral neuroscience, the study of the biological systems, especially the most thickening of them all, the human body, has been a delightful journey with new discoveries in to each one new class.