Imagine being locked inside a room with no air, all the exits are sealed, any hope of liberation gone. It takes the brain six minutes to die without air. In a concealed room it would take about thirty minutes to reach suffocating death. Now imagine this: being inside a room with no way out, yet there was a little opening in the wall that gave a person enough air to keep them faintly alive. That hole would be taunting. Barely keeping a person alive, making them live with all the pain and without a sense of hope or freedom...
Trotting down the sidewalk, grasping my mother’s finger, I look up at a beige building engulfing the horizon. Little could my 3-year- old mind comprehend that this building would serve as a community that would surpass every other one I would take part in. Advocate Lutheran General Hospital is where I am part of a community like no other...
I will always attribute my pursuit of a career in surgery to a man who I worked with early in my junior year while volunteering at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in the Patient Care Equipment Department. Sitting next to the shelf of SCD machines, waiting for the printer to spit out a request for another life-saving device, Joel told me his dreams of becoming a physical therapist and his struggle with helping his wife finally immigrate to the US from the Philippines...
The voice of the teacher was pointed in my direction, but my eyes were elsewhere, panning the room and looking at all the beautifully crafted instruments surrounding me. “Who’s your private teacher?” I looked up and her curious gaze was on me. I could feel my cheeks flush red as the room grew warmer...
As I peeked around walls curiously, and hovered over shoulders prolongedly, I began to realize I was always watching them. In fact, I loved watching my older brothers. No matter what small thing they were doing – reading comic books, creating home-videos, drawing a picture – I was enthralled. Maybe it was because I was a developing child and they were bounding teenagers, or perhaps it was because they were my complete and utter role models, but whatever it was, I surely annoyed them...
I’ll admit; sometimes I worry about myself. One of my earliest memories should apply to a middle-aged businessman, not an elementary school kid. Facing the drudgery of a long back-seat car ride, I was probably so melodramatic to complain of being “bored to death,” but as the dashboard read five p.m., my ears caught the notes of the radio show’s introduction. I became rapt with attention waiting for the familiar sound of those three simple words: “This is NPR.”..
Back