My interest in medicine began the day that my father was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma. While his fight with cancer proved to be a challenging time for my family, it shaped who I am as a person.
This time in my life inspired me to pursue a more technical career in medicine: chemical engineering. I chose to pursue this degree by working for the pharmaceutical industry in mind. I saw this as a way to still contribute to healthcare and as a way to honor my father’s win against cancer. Fortunately, I was able to be exposed to pharmaceutical manufacturing when I worked two co-op rotations with Patheon Pharmaceuticals. While I enjoyed learning about the manufacturing process for pharmaceuticals, I learned that engineering wasn’t the path that I needed to take to pursue my long-term goals of impacting the lives of patients. I felt like my co-op experience was very much missing the patient interactions. It was often comfortable for full-time employees to forget how important their work was – they were making medicine that directly impacted the patient’s lives. All of this contributed to my pursuance of the volunteer internship program at Crossroad Health Center.
Moving forward, I decided to finish up my BS in chemical engineering, but to also pursue a pre-medical certificate. It was then that I applied to the volunteer internship program at Crossroad Health Center. I viewed this program as a way to check all of the boxes that I was missing at my experiences in pharmaceuticals: I was going to be able to interact with patients, and I was going to be in an environment where everybody was working to make the patient’s lives better. My experience at Crossroad has exceeded these expectations. The staff at Crossroad are all fantastic people who put the patients first. Additionally, the volunteer interns get to take part in serving the patients by assisting with scheduling referral appointments, reminding the patients of upcoming appointments, documenting patient cases, and occasionally scheduling transportation to ensure that the patients can reach their appointments.
To demonstrate how dedicated the staff is to serve people in need, on my first day, I became hypoglycemic and briefly lost consciousness. The nurses, medical assistants, and a physician immediately started caring for me. They didn’t bat an eye; their response to care for me was immediate. This is the dedication that Crossroad has for people who need help: direct care and prioritizing the patients. It has been an honor to be apart of the volunteer internship program there.
No comments:
Post a Comment