Constant

As a 19 year old college student, life seems to be only getting more and more stressful by the minute. Living in the constant stress of trying to maintain good grades, working  2 jobs, a total of 30-35 hours a week to be able to pay for my personal expenses, such as gas, driving to school and back. School supplies, phone bill and gym membership. As well as, fixing any car issues that seems to be having issues like every other week, and not to forget personal inquires of living like food, deodorant and any other important personal needs. The feeling of trying to maintain everything and keep it under control is overwhelming at times. The hardship of finishing an 8 hour shift, 2 to 10 hour, then having to go home with barely any time to do homework. Some nights I stayed up until 4 am at times and still get up for an 8 am class. well, that is also my procrastination there. but it’s hard! As if the harder I try, the harder it gets ; the less I care, the more stress and guilt builds up. The everlasting struggle of a going to school and working is exhausting. Not to forget the misery of trying to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life and hoping I am on the right path in doing so.

Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed of becoming a heart surgeon. All from this nice little incident that happened when I was about 9 years old. One day, I was extremely ill and had severe chest pain. My mother took me to the doctor’s office and got it checked up to see what’s wrong. This old, white bearded doctor, sadly cannot remember the name, examined and x-rayed my chest and thankfully there was nothing major but just a little fever. Anyways, everything was fine and as we were chatting, the doctor looked at my mother and said “You have a special little intelligent boy…” then looking back at me, “One day I will write ‘Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim – heart surgeon and family doctor’ on the billboard outside of your clinic, if I am still alive.” Since then, that sparked the idea of me being a doctor. Giving my mom that one day I will be a doctor. Not going to lie, I was happy saw the potential in me at such a young age. I was inspired and motivated to learn all about the human body and learn more about performing surgeries. It was extremely fascinating seeing human organs outside of the human body and what each body part’s purpose was. My senior year of high school I decided to take up an Anatomy and Physiology class. It was tons of memorization but got me more excited about the medical field because it some what came to me naturally. I pretended that whenever we dissected in class like I was giving surgery. I performed precise cuts and tried to mimic procedures I imagined surgeons would do. Dissecting a small pig had a fairly similar internal structure to the human body. I first dissected the small and large intensities, as what I had been told. Then went further on by dissecting, what I could and allowed to do such as the thoracic, abdominal, cervical and cephalic regions of the pig. To examine the lungs, stomach, liver, as well as the pigs brain. Essentially, most of the important body parts of the pig’s body but the genitals. Dissecting and observing all the components of the animals body and how each organs shape followed its function was astonishing and mind blowing to me. It attracted my interested and wanted to perform more. We never dissected again in class but I remember Mrs. Harasika bringing in a cattle’s heart to observe. Most of the students were iffy and hesitant but me. Boy I put my gloves on so quick and dove into the bucket with the heart… I started examining it but feeling its texture, seeing the different chambers of the heart, the valves and so on. It was huge heart. Again, fascinating to see how sophisticated the organs of an animal, similar to humans, really is. That class brought my interests to becoming a doctor much higher and wanted to get my hands on more animals to dissect.

However, now almost 2 years later, going through 2 years of community college and trying to maintain a steady 3.3 gpa, I have no idea if that is the career I want to pursue. If my grades are good enough to get into graduate/Medical school or if this is that what I am truly passionate about. What I want to do in life, I want to excel. I do not want to be average, I do not want to do the bare minimum to pass, I do not like feeling guilty for trying my absolute best, and it not being good enough. Therefore, I have been thinking a lot of what I want to do for my  near future. So I tried other doctoral related jobs and shadowed or observed what the job consisted of. I went to ATI, a physical therapy office, and shadowed for about a month in the summer of 2016. It was interesting to see all the exercises and movements one had to do to rehabilitate or recover from an injury, but got too boring because all that came in where old people and it was a lot of massaging!!! So then I tried to shadow at a chiropractor, who I went to for shoulder, groin and lower back pain and that is where I learned just a little about the spine and bones in the body. That was really interesting, at the time I walked in with a not so perfect posture, and as the doctor was working on me to fix my posture, it felt great cracking my back and giving me tips on how to have a better posture but also became uninterested real quickly by all doing the same procedures over and over and over again that had no help in curing my groin and shoulder pain whatsoever. So I just stopped going.