Ditto!
My interest to become a doctor came about after I made a career change into the healthcare field. I always made high grades in school, but I never capitalized on it as a traditional college student. I was more of a rebel then and wanted to make it as an entrepeneur. I did well for several years as a builder with my craft being masonry. I also worked part-time as a boxing coach and absolutely love the sport. I worked with youth that needed guidance and a positive outlet to use their energy toward gaining success rather than choices that lead to failure. So my motivation to help people has always been there. Since starting my clinicals as a rad tech I know without a doubt becoming a doctor is my next goal. After seeing the birth of my two girls ob/gyn is the field I’m most interested in. Emergency medicine is also an interest, but delivering life is leading the way. I read the book, “The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman” and this also helped to spark my interest in ob/gyn medicine. If all goes well with undergrad I should be applying to med school in 2015. I have a 4.0 so far through tech school where I’ll earn an A.S. degree in radiology science. I have a thirst for knowledge now that I don’t remember having at any other point in my life. It’s kind of strange that I didn’t find this passion years ago.
I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid. I would even watch the surgery shows on television with great interest. In my teens, however, I developed a certain sense of hypochondria that I knew would hold me back from medical school (I’d hear about some rare form of cancer and it would cause this uneasy feeling inside me). I also found a great interest in computers and physics. I parlayed this into a degree in computer engineering and started working for a large company putting my degree to good use. All along I thought it would have been great to become a doctor, but I probably could not emotionally survive medical school due to my hypochondria.
I got married in 2005 and had a child the next year. Also got a master’s in the same field just last year. A few years ago I started noticing that I would hear about medical conditions friends and family had and I would not be bothered nearly as much. In my late 20’s I’ve developed a sort of ability that even if something bothers me, I can quickly snap out of it and any discomfort only lasts a few minutes.
I’m also getting the calling to help more people out. In theory, the work I do can help people out, but I don’t see the difference in person. I have always had a great deal of interest in medicine (doctors have told me that engineers make the worst patients because they want to know so much). I’ve started looking at all the different fields within medicine and how I have interest in many of the fields. I probably won’t do a surgical specialty (save for the surgical aspect of ob/gyn), but I am considering internal medicine, emergency medicine, pediatrics, and ob/gyn. Much like the poster above me, I will start applying in about 3 or 4 years.
Becoming a doctor is something I’ve known for the past 15 years I was meant to do, but life always seemed to get in the way. The final push came thanks to TV. And not Grey’s Anatomy or House or ER, but rather the documentary ABC did a few years ago called Hopkins (about Johns Hopkins Hospital, of course). There’s a scene in the second episode where they show the end of a lung transplant and you get to see the new lungs inflate and pink up.
So far, the only other thing in my life that has been that amazing to me was watching my children being born.
Simply put, this is truly a love affair for me.