COM Outlook Winter 2019

NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY | 33 If becoming a premed student was finding the love of his life, this was his idea of proposing to it. He wanted to dive headfirst into what medicine had to offer, but especially, he wanted the feeling of making a difference in the world. This was an idea he hoped would be a recurring theme in health care. Fast-forward to the end of his trip. He’d seen squalor and suffering like nowhere else. Groups of abandoned children and the physically disabled lined the walkways, begging for food. The gap between poverty and affluence was unimaginable. He’d seen a widespread system of corruption and deeply ingrained social stigmas against the sick and the poor. He felt the pride in helping care for his first patient, only to have it crushed when the patient took a last, solemn breath. Nonetheless, among the red dirt and trash-packed streets of the slums housing more than a million people, he saw local health care providers working against all odds to care for others. In their actions, he saw resilience, and in their eyes, he glimpsed dedica- tion. In those people, he saw mentors, burning flames of hope weathering a downpour of suffering. Although Kenya drastically changed him—he was angry that no one cared and frustrated that, even after a month, it seemed like nothing he’d done made a difference— he was able to move past it all in hopes of becoming that idealization of medicine. Now, he’s back in the United States. He filled his senior year as an undergraduate with as much volunteering in free clinics and shadowing in hospitals as he could. He was going to become an EMT and get even more experience for medical school. It was fine that he wasn’t accepted in his first, or even second, cycle of applying, because it only gave him more time to develop his passion. His views, although more pragmatic, were still positive. He can’t always make a difference, but despite overwhelming adversity, he will still try. Fast-forward. After a year as an EMT, he’s angry, jaded, and tired. Long shifts running nonstop in an ambulance exposed him to the best and worst of health care. His outlook on medicine was turbulent, from being hands-on in delivering babies, to seeing people treated less than humanely by negligent nursing homes. Michael Lai walks through the Kaberia slum of Nairobi, Kenya, in 2014 for a daily trip, with a social worker and a doctor, to visit a man with AIDS. continued on page 34