Illuminate Your Path

Fire can mean many things. A literal burning, love, destruction, passion… the symbolism for the combustion reaction of an object is plentiful. In schooling, as graduation grows closer, so does the need to find a career path. Finding something that lights a spark in your heart to illuminate the path ahead of you. Sometimes it comes from what you love, something you’re good at, something that will make you money. Although this is true for most, my fire was lit by something different.
Throughout my life I have always been surrounded by sickness. For the first four years of my life it was a whirl of my mother, father, and grandmother, as if the strings of life were pulling in every different direction. Dealing with all of the ailments in my family, I was always trying to help in every way I could. I couldn’t bare to see anyone in pain, so at a young age I already knew I wanted to go into a career where I could assist people so they wouldn’t have to deal with the ailments of life. At four I already knew I wanted to become a doctor.
Although doctor was a strong calling, when I turned five the chaos of life thickened with the birth of my brother which began to alter my beliefs. Born with a rare disease called Mastocytosis my brother’s beginning seemed to be my end. My mother had to stop working, I had to give up my friends and after school activities, and much more to ensure his safety. I began to hate the spring because I came to find out that that was when allergens were the worst which often caused my brother to suffer through debilitating symptoms or go into shock. Our house was often chaotic or covered in blood from killer nose bleeds that soaked towels, or trying to keep the house pristine to reduce chances of contact with triggers. Life became a prison, but is was also my biggest escape.
As I grew I learned more and more about my brother’s condition and why these awful things kept happening to him. The theory (at the time) of how to prevent his triggers, why he had the disease to begin with, and what medicines he should take, became a source of research because I wanted to ease his typical daily suffering. When he was first born there was very little information on his disease and how to prevent the chatastrophic results of shock. We were told time after time that “he’ll either live or he’ll die”, until we found our current doctor who although didn’t know much was willing to help as much as he could. My mother and I spent countless hours researching and documenting what we saw in his behaviors/triggers and ended up knowing the most about the disease for a majority of my brother’s 13 years of life. These actions actually ended up changing what I wanted to become for the future.
In the last two months of my senior year, I am currently accepted to Saint Joseph’s College for the major of biochemistry. This decision was largely based upon my love for helping others and the life lessons I’ve learned through schooling and the care going toward my brother. Instead of becoming a normal doctor I am going to school to become a biomedical scientist. This career is the act of studying diseases and trying to find cures and treatments to put a stop to the suffering of these awful ailments. My passion for fixing things, to trying to find a cure or stop hurt, spread like a wildfire until it became what I want to spend the rest of my life pursuing.


Photo by Dane Vandeputte on Foter.com / CC BY-NC