Someday Doctor

Things got rather hectic recently, so I haven’t been able to post anything. But it’s all for a good reason, because I’m finally doing it!

Several weeks ago, I sat down with my wife, and we discussed medical school in a little more detail. The next day, after returning home from the grocery store, she told me I should do it! And even more than that, she said I should make it happen as quickly as possible. So in the last several weeks, we’ve put our house up for lease, found a renter, moved to Lubbock, and applied for classes for this fall! Everything has happened so quickly, and everything seems to be falling into place.

I still have two years of undergraduate sciences to catch up on before I can actually apply for medical school, but at the ripe old age of 31, I’m finally getting started!

More to come soon!

As an older, non traditional “someday physician”, I often have to ask myself if this is really feasible for me. Now that I’m a husband and a father, I have more than just myself to think about, and because I’m finally starting to get serious about trying to get into med school, it’s time to crunch some numbers and figure out if this is really something I’m going to be able to do.

In business school, we were taught about feasibility studies. We were taught to do a thorough analysis of a project to determine whether it was (a) physically possible and (b) fiscally feasible. Today I’m starting my own feasibility study for medical school.

Step 1: Interviews

My first step is to get in touch with as many people as possible who have experience in the medical and/or education fields and pick their brains to make sure I’m thinking through all the necessary considerations. Among my list of people to contact are: my cousin, who is currently in med school at Texas Tech, a dentist friend, another cousin who works as an RN, a pre-med advisor at a university, and as many medical and med school forums as I can find.

My 2 main goals with this step are to:

1. Determine the feasibility of going back to school given my current situation.
2. Think through any considerations that I might not have thought of on my own.

So that’s where I am right now. Any and all suggestions/advice are more than welcome!

I bought a bookmark a few years ago with a quote from George Eliot engraved on it.

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

As a 31-year-old husband and father who wants to go to medical school, it’s often difficult to accept these words without some measure of hesitation and fear. Throw a pile of high-interest credit card debt in the mix, and the words become downright petrifying. It often feels like it IS too late. I often find myself thinking that if I wanted to be a doctor, I should have thought about that 13 years ago, when I graduated high school. But the fact remains that this is what I want to do, and if I continue to ignore that simply because it feels like it’s “too hard”, then I know that I will someday look back with regret that I didn’t at least try to make it happen.

But I’m in the process of formulating a plan. There are still a lot of variables to work out, and I truly have no idea how the final formula will look, but if I don’t at least point myself in the right direction and start taking baby steps, then I’ll end up sitting behind the desk at the same job for the rest of my life.

As I sit down to write my first post, I’m compelled to address the question of why I’m starting this blog. Time is a precious commodity, and with a family, a full-time job, and a struggling freelance web design career, I don’t exactly have a surplus of it. So why spend the time creating and updating a new blog?

Well, with everything that’s going on, I need an outlet of some sort, a place to talk about my goals openly, a place to start a conversation with others who are going through (or have gone through) the same thing. As the Proverb says, “Two are better than one,” and “a cord of three strands is not easily broken.”

The Dream

When you’re 18 years old and you announce to your family that you want to go to medical school, you quickly become a source of pride to the whole family. But when you’re 31 and you make the same declaration, people look at you like you’re crazy. Once you reach a certain age, you’re no longer encouraged to follow your dreams, to live life to the fullest. Rather, you’re mildly scolded and reminded of your responsibilities.

My question is this. Why can’t we be responsible and still shoot for our dreams at the same time? As a 31-year-old man with a wife and a 9-month-old daughter, I’m inescapably aware of my responsibilities, and I’m also aware that because of our current financial situation, medical school may never happen for me. But that doesn’t mean a man can’t dream, does it? As long as my responsibilities are being met, and as long as I’m keeping my family top priority in the planning process, why is it so crazy that I want to find a way to make this work?

The Reality

Having said all of this, I should mention that I fully understand and appreciate the reasons behind the reactions. When you hear that a 31-year-old family man with debt problems wants to give up his full-time time job to go to medical school, it’s natural to be concerned. A barrage of questions immediately comes to mind. How are you going to pay for it? How are you going to pay your CURRENT bills while you’re in school? What is your family going to do if you can’t pay your mortgage and/or car payments? And the truth is that I currently don’t know how to answer any of these questions. So I have to gently remind people that I’m not just going to jump in and do this recklessly. In fact, until I can answer all of the above questions, I believe that I have no business actively pursuing this dream.

The Present

So, here I sit at the same desk, working the same jobs, doing everything I can to pay the bills and provide for my family. Will my dream of someday practicing medicine ever come to fruition? I can honestly say that I have no idea. But until I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s too late for me, I’m not giving up hope.