Chapter 2 Perfect Phrases for Introductions
Like a smile and a firm handshake, a well-conceived introduction can create an instant positive impression in admissions readers that may pay valuable dividends when you later need them to sympathize with one of your failings or sit through a not-so-compelling example. Ideally your introduction will tell readers what you will be accomplishing in the essay, catch and hold their interest, establish your tone, and provide some of the context or detail that creates your story's foundation. Let your themes, specific story, and creativity suggest the introduction that works best for you.
The following perfect phrases will give you some idea of the variety of ways in which it's possible to open your essay:
I first saw America from the inside of a hospital. Fifteen years ago my family and I escaped religious persecution in Vietnam to start a new life in the United States. During our three-week voyage to freedom, however, my brother Bao developed acute gastroenteritis from the rainwater we were forced to drink to survive. Without medical attention his life was in danger, so we spent our first two weeks in the Land of Freedom praying that Richmond Memorial's skilled doctors could pull him through. My first memory of America will always be the comfort and assurance that Doctors Weseltier and Gupta showed my brother and my family. They gave him his life again, which made our future in America possible.
"Failure to thrive." The phrase on Reed's chart seemed both coldly clinical and uncannily accurate. I first met Reed as a volunteer at Newark General Hospital when one of the nurses asked me to feed him his dinner while she tended to other tasks. When I peeked into Reed's room, I saw his two roommates eating their dinners with obvious gusto, but Reed seemed to be in a world of his own, oblivious to his surroundings and the meal before him.
"I got my ass whupped, but I am a warrior, and I will get those three guys. Just sew me up!" As soon as I heard Jim One Bull's words, I knew that the laceration over his left eye was less of a concern than the entrapped inferior rectus muscle he'd just referred to. Volunteering last summer at the U.S. Public Health Service's Indian Hospital in Clinton, Oklahoma, gave me a wonderful opportunity to witness doctors healing not only the damaged body, but the injured psyche.
Washing the blood from Kimberlea's shoes was the least I could do. The 16-year-old had been waiting expectantly to be discharged at last from St. Louis Regional's ob-gyn emergency room when she suddenly began bleeding uncontrollably. Confused shock and horror swept over her face as she watched the torrent running. Dashing to her side, I escorted Kimberlea to a dilation and curettage procedure room, never letting go of her hand. As the physician performed a D&C on Kimberlea, I comforted her by gently stroking her hair. The procedure successfully concluded, I personally escorted Kimberlea to a bed and returned to the procedure room for her clothes. Seeing her blood-drenched shoes, I immediately began cleaning them—my routine tasks could wait. It became my guiding principle: do for patients what you would appreciate them doing for you.
It felt like someone had jabbed a knife into my lower back. I was doing a routine "butterflies" exercise with 95 pounds of weight during college football training, when I felt my upper body suddenly freeze up and a wave of pain roll down my right leg. As I lay on my back wondering what had happened, I remember thinking that it was just a severe back spasm; I would be scrimmaging with my teammates in no time. I had no way of knowing that I had herniated a disk in my spine and would be living with debilitating pain for the next one and a half years.
It's 7:00 a.m. in a rural hospital in Gansu province, China. As I clean a third-degree wound on a young girl, I hear a patient's gurney barreling noisily down the corridor. A fragile, panicked young woman is pushing her brother, who, thrown from his motorcycle, is drenched in blood and wincing at the pain from his broken nose and left leg. Though I'm startled to see that his blood has turned the entire pillow scarlet, I'm relieved that his coughs have forced the blood out of his nose, preventing coagulation in his lungs. But within seconds of his grasping my hand, his eyelids slowly shut, and he fades into unconsciousness. As his sister becomes hysterical, I summon the doctors, only to watch in shock and horror as they pass by the patient to ask me whether the sister has paid the $20 radiology and $100 hospital room fees.
Wasn't leprosy an extinct disease like the Black Plague? Touring Thailand's Klongtuey Leprosy Center and Rehabilitation Hospital last November, my eyes gave me the answer. Though leprosy has been treatable for years, some one million cases still exist in developing parts of the world.
The slimy, intricate viscera of a rat spilled out onto the operating table as Dr. Rubin Maslov proceeded to perform a tracheotomy. On my first day of research at Steerwright Laboratory, I silently marveled: How do the rat's parts combine to form the furry creature that was sniffing my hand a minute before it was anesthetized?
"Go ahead—touch it." Stepping forward to peer into the patient's open heart, I was both awed and fascinated by the bright red muscle pulsing methodically under the glare of the operating room lights. It looked just like the pictures in the anatomy book I had read as a child. But this was real. Spurred by Dr. Wen's stories of open-heart surgery, I asked him if I could someday observe a surgery, and two weeks later I found myself scrubbing up with him and standing by as he opened the patient's chest. But Dr. Wen wanted me to experience the surgery more than just visually; he wanted me to physically touch the muscle. So, nervously, I leaned forward and extended a finger into the open chest. Suddenly, a stream of blood squirted from the pumping heart onto my surgical mask. The smell of blood permeated the OR, and I felt beads of sweat trickling down my forehead. The next thing I remember I was on the floor as a nurse waggled smelling salts under my nose. I couldn't believe I had just passed out! To my infinite gratitude Dr. Wen later assured me that mine had been a very common experience for first-time OR visitors.
Two pounds, six ounces was the exact weight of little Anton when he was prematurely thrust into the world. As I stood outside the nursery window, I could see his tiny body barely visible beneath the tubes and electrodes taped to his pink-blue skin. Seeing Anton clinging frailly to life, I felt a swell of anger replace the fondness I had always felt for his 17-year-old mother. For six months, I had helped Jade prepare for the GED so she could support her new family. As her teacher, I was responsible for her academics, but I found myself more preoccupied with her health. Poor and uninsured, Jade did not seek prenatal care, and more than once I smelled alcohol and cigarettes on her breath. "No, I'm clean," she repeatedly vowed to me. Now, learning that Jade had been high when she went into labor, I felt betrayed because it was Anton who suffered from the actions his mother's lies concealed.
"Do I live on the first or second floor?" Mrs. Moulton asked me one evening. I was astonished by her question. For the three months I had known her in my role as food server for St. Ignatius Home, Mrs. Moulton had always flashed me a bright smile that instantly nullified her advanced years and institutionalized surroundings. Through our always pleasant conversations I had learned that this distinguished but unassuming woman was a retired physician. Her question to me just now was doubly unnerving because it meant not only that she had forgotten where her room was, but that St. Ignatius has only one floor.
You have a choice—your career or someone's life. That was the decision I seemed to be facing when I answered my phone at 2 a.m. on the day of my final presentation for my senior research seminar in Vanderbilt University's department of immunology and microbiology. But when the renal transplant coordinator at Davidson Memorial Medical Center, where I worked in kidney procurement and perfusion, called to ask me if I could assist in a kidney perfusion that morning, I knew I had to say yes.
"Now what's he doing to Blake?" I whispered to my mom. For years Dr. John Stedelin, my pediatrician, was the last person in Centralia, Illinois, I wanted to see. As a child, I was blind to his compassion because I equated him with the throat cultures and painful immunizations I feared. But after my brother Blake was born, I would accompany him on his visits to Dr. Stedelin without being distracted by my dread of needles and swabs. My fear of Dr. Stedelin gradually evolved into a deep curiosity, something like the awe curious children feel as they watch a magician's illusion.
"Brad, the camera crews are here!" my coworker called to me as the door opened behind her and news crews from the local TV stations filed into our laboratory. They had come to Syracuse University Medical Center to report a medical breakthrough: as part of the first comprehensive program in the United States to treat autoimmune diseases using bone marrow transplantation, our team had successfully treated a patient with systemic lupus using a new technique called elutriation.
Virzenias was not very popular in our house. It wasn't his smoke-stained teeth, his macabre appearance, or even the vague scent of death on his clothes. It was the fact that his Sunday-morning phone calls meant my mother would not be with us for mass. As the autopsy technician who worked with my mother in her pathology practice at San Ysidro Hospital, Virzenias had the absolute power to call my mother away whenever an autopsy had to be performed.
As I stepped into the dim "operating room," the first thing that hit me was the smell. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out Dr. Kutral removing the long iodoform wick from Sreela's left breast. In time I would learn to recognize that smell—pseudomonas infection. Sreela's eyes were pinched shut, but she made no sound. The size and shape of her nose ring told me she was of a low caste, and I knew she had been nursing her two-month-old boy from her uninfected breast because she was too poor to buy expensive formula. After repacking and dressing the wound, Dr. Kutral wrote Sreela a prescription, and she went back out to her crying son. Later, the doctor confided to me that Sreela would have to choose between the medication and food for her family. Reeling from what I had just witnessed, I walked out of the "clinic" (it lacked both running water and electricity) into the noisy, bustling village I would call home for the next five weeks.
"Code 10. Code 10." As I rush down to the cardiac floor to answer the call from a patient reporting chest pain, my own heart begins to pound as I review the procedures I will soon be executing with my first emergency cardiac patient: the initial exam, the subsequent tests and—if the situation worsens—the call for backup. I've just told the nurse to start the patient on oxygen and obtain a 12-lead EKG, and as I approach the patient's room I mentally review the possible scenarios. At best, the patient's chest pain is not cardiac-related; at worst, it is a manifestation of his already lengthy history of cardiac instability. This is the moment of truth—the first of many—medical school will prepare me to face and flawlessly handle.
"Gross margin and P&Ls to gross anatomy and H&Ps." If I had to come up with a headline to describe the career shift I've made in the past year, that would probably be it. In the space of 12 months I've gone from analyzing the bottom lines of profit-and-loss statements as an equity analyst for T. Rowe Price to reading journal articles on "post-transectional axonal repair" as a post-baccalaureate premed student.
The lines start forming at sunrise. By the time my shift as a volunteer at Ürümqi's Xinhua Hospital begins at eight sharp, a queue of cancer patients winds down Zunggar Street as far as the eye can see. After five summers of volunteering in New York City hospitals, when the time came for my January interim premed project, I knew I had to do something completely different. After several months' effort, my friend Kristen and I won permission from western China's two largest public health institutes to spend a month shadowing doctors and learning everything we could about China's public medical system.
"Am I there yet?" I heard the resident ask from behind the curtain. "Do you still see bone on the drill?" the physician replied matter-of-factly. Horrified, I threw a quick glance at the patient's family, who—I thanked God—were too dazed with shock to understand what was unfolding on the other side.