Being accepted into the Scholars in Rural Health program is a huge honor. When did you first realize you wanted to become a doctor?<strong>Being accepted into the Scholars in Rural Health program is a huge honor. When did you first realize you wanted to become a doctor?</strong> Being accepted into the Scholars in Rural Health program is a huge honor. When did you first realize you wanted to become a doctor?
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What got me interested in medicine was a report I did on leukemia in the seventh grade. It really just sparked my interest into medicine and what was involved in the human body and what treating disease and stuff like that was about. And I started researching doctors who treat cancer and that’s where it really started. I started wanting to go into oncology, which is the treatment of cancer. It kind of evolved from there and I ended up deciding wanting to go to a small town, and doing primary care is what I really wanted.
Growing up, did you ever have any other ideas of what you wanted to be when you got older?<strong>Growing up, did you ever have any other ideas of what you wanted to be when you got older?</strong> Growing up, did you ever have any other ideas of what you wanted to be when you got older?
Oh, I’m famous in Wamego for being the 4-year-old kid who told everyone he wanted to be a trash man. That’s not a joke. I wanted to be a garbage man when I was 4 years old. Just last week, I was home watching my brother play football, and the guy sitting in front of us turned around and said, ‘oh, there’s the trash man.’ I’m almost 21 years old and this was 15, 16 years ago and there’s still people who stop me and talk to me about the fact that I wanted to be a trash man. That was probably the only other thing that I wanted to be for a long time. Other than a doctor, every elementary school kid goes through those stages where they want to be this and then they want to be that. I went through that. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be and then seventh grade and that report came, and ever since then I wanted to go into medicine.
What was so appealing about being a trash man?<strong>What was so appealing about being a trash man?</strong> What was so appealing about being a trash man?
I just liked watching the trash trucks, because they were large and they were big and noisy and had a thing that crushed the trash in the back. I think that was it. But I always had to watch the trash man every Tuesday when they collected our trash. It was like my thing. I’d hear them coming up the street and I’d run out of the backyard to go watch them on the side of the house. I even named the guys. I didn’t even know them, but I made up names for them.
Is there anyone who has had an influence on your decision to go into medicine?<strong>Is there anyone who has had an influence on your decision to go into medicine?</strong> Is there anyone who has had an influence on your decision to go into medicine?
I think my mom is a big one. She’s a nurse and she has always been there to talk to me about medical things: treatments, drugs that I don’t know. She’s always been willing to talk to me about different aspects of medicine. Even the hard ones, like when you get to a point where a patient just wants to die and wants to be taken off medication or oxygen. Those kind of tough things she’s always been willing to talk to me about that. She set up a lot of my shadowing situations at the hospital. She was willing to go to doctors she worked with and say, ‘do you mind if my son comes in one morning and follows you around?’ And because she knew them and they trusted her, it was much easier for them to say yes to that because they knew who I was and that my mom was going to be there at the same time. My whole family has always been supportive and said, ‘whatever it is you want to do, you can do it.’ When it was a doctor, they were all for it.
