Chapter 12 Perfect Phrases for Challenges and Disadvantage
"Describe your toughest challenge in life thus far and how you handled it."
(Wayne State University)
"If you feel that you have encountered significant disadvantages and would like the Admissions Committee to take them into consideration, you are invited (not required) to provide this additional information."
(University of Wisconsin)
Medical schools believe they can find out a lot about how applicants will deal with the challenges of medical school by seeing how they've dealt with the challenges they've encountered in life. Applicants who can show they've come through a lot to get where they are today will be viewed with special favor by admissions readers happy to reward determination and focus. Making difficult decisions, overcoming obstacles, battling through resistance—all of these can be powerful material for essays about challenge. Let's look at some challenge and disadvantage perfect phrases.
I was a sophomore in high school when my father decided to take a job in Texas. My brother and I were to stay in Florida with our mother to finish our schooling and then join him in San Antonio in the new house he planned to buy there. He did buy that house, moving all our furniture there, while we continued to live in a small furnished one-bedroom near the projects. But the original one-year separation expanded into two years and then two and a half. When my father finally told us we could pack up for Texas, I was beginning college in Tallahassee and decided against transferring. Incensed, my father informed me that I could pay for my college education on my own—beginning with next quarter's tuition check! Two years later, I was making slow progress toward my degree while balancing a 35-hour workweek, when my mother called to say my father had "fallen in love" and wanted a divorce. My mother's tone of voice, one I'd never heard before, told me it was time for me to fly to Texas and help her and my brother cope. College would have to wait.
While I was looking for an NGO to help me, I found myself in Bujumbura in front of a sign that read, "Burundi National Progress Trust." In a thick French accent, Dr. Domitian Ndadaye, a retired doctor who came to manage the site once a month, described the "rehabilitation" protocol: "We keep them here for three days, and by that time they are cured." Swallowing my urge to question this "regimen," I resolved to create change from within and began building trust with my two fellow volunteers, both struggling former bhang addicts. I was convinced that a 12-step program could succeed in Burundi and set about developing and implementing a model adapted to the local idiom. I spent many late nights next to a lantern with a third-grade Kirundi grammar book, an English-Kirundi dictionary, chalk, and the wooden crates I used to fashion signs for each of the 12 steps, which I then nailed to the wall of our meeting place. The other volunteers laughed at my crude attempts at first, but they helped nonetheless. Within a few weeks I felt more confident in the language and ready to facilitate classes and discussions with actual patients. As attendance in these classes grew, gradually I gained the trust of Dr. Ndadaye and convinced him to invest in a library and gym for the patients. After a year, I have developed close relationships with some patients. I have visited their villages, met and spoken with their families, and even become their friends.
It looked like it was going to get ugly. My first week at Henderson County Youth Shelter, a short-term alternative youth program for male adolescents in Las Vegas, I shadowed another counselor to understand the many tasks we all do at the home: cooking meals, performing the chores, making sure the kids have clothes to wear, and so on. In only my second week there I was getting the teenagers ready for bed—hygiene and music until 9:30 and then lights out—when Hector, a 16-year-old with a history of crime, began to get rowdy. Calling on his peers to "blow this place," he began jumping around from peer to peer trying to get them to follow his lead. I was alone, and the night shift did not begin till 11:30. As the younger teenagers began to respond to Hector's incitement, I tried to assure them, with limited success, that it was not in their best interests to walk out of this open-door program. Realizing that I had only minutes to deescalate the situation, I had to act decisively. I could call juvenile detention to remove Hector, but that might lead to a struggle and Hector's reassignment to jail. I decided to tackle the problem directly: I demanded that he go back to bed. Hector laughed off my command by saying he didn't have to listen to any "country boy" from Maine who didn't know what it was like growing up on the streets of North Vegas. Realizing I needed to make a connection with him, I began to converse with him in Spanish, asking him to sit with me at the desk "just to talk." I made no threats or ultimatums; I gave Hector my full attention and asked him what was going on ("¿Que pasa?"). Twenty minutes later, I had learned about his tough childhood as a single-parent child and early brushes with gangs and alcoholism. Hector's long life narrative—and perhaps his surprise at my interest—diffused his anger. I turned the shelter's lights out that night with no "insurrection" or escaped inmates. My conversations with Hector continued nightly for the next two weeks. When he told me he didn't want to return to a life of crime in North Las Vegas, I saw my opening and invited him to help me run some shelter activities. His response over the next month was incredible. He became active both in his treatment and in house events, and he developed into a true leader. After graduating from the program a year later, he regularly came back to say hello and let us know he was doing fine.
My father was born in the wilds of northern Wyoming but after earning a scholarship to Yale and then a JD at Harvard Law, he settled in Manhattan, where he met and eventually married my mother. After I finished fourth grade, my parents decided to spend a year in Paris and sent me to live with my grandparents in the small Wyoming ranching town of Rail Gap. Even at my resilient young age the lifestyle contrasts between Rail Gap and the Upper East Side were a major shock. Instead of the personal maid who had prepared my choice of breakfasts on East 89th Street, I had to quickly develop culinary self-sufficiency when my grandparents told me the only "vittles" were biscuits and cream gravy. Instead of a five-minute limousine ride to The Brearley School, I found myself thrown into the Wyoming winter cold every morning for a bumpy 45-minute bus ride to Rail Gap Elementary, a place that perfectly conformed to my mental image of a penitentiary for the criminally insane.
Shanice, a 17-year-old high school senior, was a patient on our floor when she suffered, through no identifiable human error, an extremely rare brain injury during a routine appendectomy. This unusual complication—its etiology remains unexplained—left her completely paralyzed. Her hearing, vision, and sense of touch were fine, but she could not blink, talk, walk, or move any other muscle voluntarily. Every day, virtually everyone in her high school came to Roosevelt Memorial's ICU to see Shanice. I too saw her daily, even held her hand and spoke to her and her friends and family. It was heartrending beyond words to see her lying still in her bed when shortly before she had been laughing and joking with the nurses and her baby brother, Trevon. During Shanice's stay in the ICU, I came home every night emotionally exhausted and angry that such an inexplicable calamity could have occurred to so healthy and vivacious a girl. After six weeks Shanice developed pneumonia and died. I tried to seek solace in older colleagues' assurances that eventually you learn to compartmentalize your emotions over patients whose personalities, hopes, and pains are so vividly on display, but they didn't help. Was I really cut out for a medical career?
During my last three years at Occidental College I worked long hours as both a phlebotomist and then as an EKG technician. After my first days of training and blood-drawing practice on fellow workers and healthy patients, I was sent off to do my first solo blood draw in the ER. I was handed one of the toughest cases: an elderly woman with multiple chronic illnesses and an arm whose "good" veins had all been stuck repeatedly. To add to the pressure, anxious family members crowded into the tiny prison-block-sized room, suspiciously following my every move. After missing her vein twice, I was close to giving up and seeking help, but decided to try once more. Using a tiny "butterfly" needle, I found the vein! In my haste to finish, however, I inflicted on myself the phlebotomist's worst nightmare—a needle stick. Racing back to the lab, I soaked my finger in Betadine, and felt my heart sink as I learned that I would have to undergo six months of testing. Luckily, the woman was fine and had no serious infections.
Hearing is something young people take for granted, and I was no different. In my quest to be a professional drummer and singer, developing a hearing condition was the furthest thing from my mind. Unfortunately, in practicing and performing for a musical career, I was exposed to noise louder than the human auditory system was meant to take, and I developed hyperacusis—a painful sensitivity to normal environmental sounds. In addition to persistent tinnitus, I experienced physical pain when doors were shut and phones rang around me, and even running water and normal conversation could cause me discomfort. When I heard certain high-pitched sounds, I would feel dizzy and nauseous. Normal careers, let alone a musical one, seemed impossible.
"I don't want to do this." I could practically hear myself thinking the words as the reality of Al's absence hit home. Suddenly, the hospital hall that had been busy with people felt lonely and cold. Just 20 hours before I had been standing in this same hallway on my first volunteer assignment at Stamford Hospital, having my first conversation with Al, an elderly patient who had bowel removal surgery a few days before. He seemed distressed, so I went over to him and asked if he needed anything. "No dear," he said, "I'm just getting some exercise." That was the beginning of a friendly exchange after which I walked him back to his bed and told him I'd see him tomorrow. On my way home that evening, I reflected fondly on the satisfactions of patient interaction I'd experienced on my first day as a volunteer. The following day I went to greet Al, and to my surprise saw a new patient in his bed. The nurse informed me that Al had suffered cardiac arrest the night before and had "expired.""You mean he died?" I asked stupidly. I didn't want to believe what I was hearing. Traumatized and depressed by the news, I signed out for the day. Over the next few days, I began to question my career goals. If I couldn't cope with the loss of a patient, then maybe I wasn't cut out for medicine.
In the spring of 1999, my younger sister QiaoQiao was diagnosed with a rare case of skin cancer and given three to six months to live. I believed—I knew—she would survive. In the meantime, she was spending her time in the hospital, missing school and morbidly preoccupied with her illness. I decided to tutor her in math and English. Soon, some of my friends started volunteering to help entertain QiaoQiao too. Gathering informally a few times a week, we quickly befriended other kids in the ward and began entertaining them with books, videogames, and comics.
That inspiring success story was dealt a serious blow when I developed anorexia at age 14. After struggling for two years against this debilitating eating disorder, I was admitted to a hospital program the summer before my sophomore year. At St. Luke's, I met girls like myself who were so malnourished they had to limit how much they walked to minimize the calories they burned. Other girls hadn't successfully kept a meal down for many months. The St. Luke's program taught us how to gain weight and meet our nutritional needs, but it also gave me my first lesson in how inadequately the American health-care system treats mental illness. I won't forget my anger when I first learned that girls I had grown to care about were forced to leave our $1,250-a-day program despite dangerously low blood pressure, osteoporosis, or irregular heartbeat—all because their inpatient treatment insurance coverage was limited or had expired.
When my father moved our family from Egypt to the United States in 1990, he sacrificed a solid career, a comfortable lifestyle, and a respected role in Cairo's academic community so that my sister and I could receive American educations. Despite his Ph.D. and extensive curriculum vitae, he struggled in America, working as an assistant professor at a community college for five years before trying to strike out on his own as a consulting engineer—with mixed results. When I asked him once why he had made all these sacrifices, he said only that we were not only his children but his duty. I lost my chance to fully thank him for this gift when he unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1997, a week before his forty-seventh birthday. My father's legacy of integrity, determination, and selflessness kept me going as I, though only 12, tried to be the "man in the family" for my devastated mother.
"Oh my God, you were placed at Cherry Street!" My teacher-in-training classmates at Concordia University consoled me as word spread that my first trial-by-fire as a public school teacher would occur in one of the Twin Cities' least "comfortable and convenient" schools—Cherry Street High School in St. Paul's tough inner city. Soon, I learned some of the grim details about Cherry Street: a school administrator had been gunned down when his shady business dealings went awry, a child of one of the teachers assaulted someone with a deadly weapon, and so on. I can't say I was surprised then when on my first day in class my students challenged me directly, complaining, "Why do we have to learn this?" Seeing that at Cherry Street respect had to be earned, I began telling them my story. As a high school student, I had hated studying and much preferred the basketball court, until a teacher who knew my family informed me that if I scored well enough on the SAT, I could earn scholarships to college—enabling my mother to quit one of the two jobs she was working to fund my education. By overcoming my fear of mathematics, I earned a high enough score to win a tuition-free ride at the University of Wisconsin. When my Cherry Street students realized that my background was no different from theirs, they began to see me as a role model for their own success. I did have to send the occasional student to detention, but most gradually showed motivation to learn. Two months later, when I stayed late to help the students prepare for the SAT, the entire class showed up.
My wife Dawn had had morning sickness before, but this was something different. Early into her pregnancy, Dawn's symptoms worsened, so I had her move back to Atlanta where her parents could take better care of her and our two-year-old daughter, Aimee. When Dawn began repeatedly vomiting blood, however, I took an advance leave and immediately returned to Georgia. The test results showed high levels of thyroid hormones—harmless if caused by pregnancy, but, if they were preexisting, they could potentially affect both Dawn and our baby. I immediately requested a leave of absence from my analyst's position and stayed by Dawn's hospital bed until she and the baby were fine. I was shocked to learn on my return three weeks later that all my work had been reassigned to another analyst. The manager I had willingly sacrificed evenings and weekends for for two years muttered something about "needing people we can count on" and indicated vaguely that the promotion he had promised had "encountered some resistance." Two months later I was downsized. Though I was devastated, Dawn's illness had reminded me of what I really care about. We are resolved to love and care for our new child, normal or not, and our lives will probably never be the same. I know now that I will succeed in transitioning into medicine, but I also know what I didn't before: that my most important consideration now will always be the needs and wishes of my family. They will always come first.