The door steadily opened, and she walked in with a big smile on her face and a bigger Polaroid camera in her hands.

I grew up in a small, coastal town on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Port Angeles is a close-knit community that fits the cliche of the town where everyone knows each other.

To be a physician is to be a leader. Deciding on a treatment plan when the diagnosis is uncertain; advising a resistant patient to follow the proposed course of treatment; directing nurses and other health care personnel in assisting in patients’ care: these essential duties of a physician require leadership skills.

I was pounding on the treadmill when the call came. As I picked up the phone, my mother’s calm voice came on the line.

I sat on the second floor of the Centro Médico Dominicano and reassembled, for the fifth time that morning, the plastic eye model I had used to understand the hundreds of ocular disorders introduced in my copy of The Wills Eye Manual.

My first exposure to medicine began with my aunt, an acupuncturist. I spent a lot of my childhood in my aunt’s clinic “helping” diagnose patients.

After high school, I chose to join the United States Marine Corps to gain direction and improve my self-efficacy. When I first joined, one of my fears was getting vaccinated.

Four years ago, I married my college sweetheart. Just over a year later, Sheldon was found without a pulse on the locker room floor at the gym.

Most kids got a new car or the latest iPhone when they turned sixteen. My father bought me a book.

I envy those whose passions trace back to a perfect anecdote, because mine do not.

When I was sixteen years old and about to become a high school senior, my father had an unexpected stroke: a Pontine Hemorrhage.

Of all the doctors I had met, this one was by far the strangest, and I looked upon her with some suspicion.

My macho Mexican father told me in a serious tone, “Son, you are only allowed to cry once in your life and that time is when your father dies.”

“Have a minute to go over this follow-up? It was a tough one.”

I spun around in my chair to face the intern helping me check in on patients a year after their strokes. She looked nervous.

Summers in the city were tough to bear. My internship at the Community Action Partnership’s Human Development Corporation (HDC) burdened me with the task of recording “Family-need Evaluation” minutes.

As Dr. Hotchner ruffled his patient’s sheets, I was horrified by what he unveiled. The face underneath was mauled, and through its swelling I could barely identify a boy only slightly older than myself.

While not a scientific endeavor, allowing Google to auto-populate queries into an empty search bar is an amusing way to glimpse at the most pressing medical needs of our modern America.

My passion for caring for others began with my mother. Growing up in a working-class family in Oklahoma, my two siblings and I took pride in caring for her.

One afternoon, when I was fourteen, I came home from school, tossed my backpack on the couch, and shouted for my Mom. “What’s up?” she called back.

As Deo stopped talking and drifted out of consciousness, his head sagged and his body went limp.