People have always asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And it was only recently (around last year or so) that I started answering, "A doctor!".  I am rather indecisive and slowly "a doctor" had "or something in the medical field" tacked onto it.  I suppose I should aim high and if it does not work out then it does not work out - but I should probably keep my goals high first.  It's just that my brother has been studying for his MCAT and he keeps telling me how I need to get my study habits together now if I want to do well in just college in general.  He had been studying for about seven hours a day or more for his MCAT and still feels he isn't ready (well other things had been going on in our family as well).
That brings me back to one of the reasons why I wanted to be a doctor - what had been going on in my family.  This year around the end of February, my father went to the hospital due to some intense stomach pains he had been feeling.  I know I did not take it seriously and so I was extremely surprised when that same night, the hospital made him stay over.  They ran tests and tests; it was only after a specialist looked at one of the results, did another test, and found inflammation on his intestine did they realize that they had been looking for the wrong things.  And even after a week or so of my dad staying in the hospital they still could not figure out what was wrong with him.  Finally when they found that he had an AVM, they found that while normally AVMs are the size of your pinky fingernail and in your brain, his was the size of a softball and in a rare place that no doctors (and I mean no doctors) were used to dealing with - in his intestinal area.  It was such a stressful time and for months the doctors did not know what to do with him.  They sent him down to UCLA because that is where the specialists of the stomach area are, and the doctors all were stumped.  I wanted to help somehow; I wanted to do something.  But there was nothing that I could do to help and often times I had no idea what the doctors were saying when talking to my dad.  It was only recently that my dad got surgery to remove part of his intestine, and that was because the doctors in UCLA messed up a bit in trying to treat him.  I'm not saying that they are incompetent - far from it actually - it's just that this type of case had never been dealt with before (or there were no recorded cases that were like it) and they were all just very confused.
A doctor being confused.  That's a scary thought.
I think I should ask my dad what exactly had been going on...and try to learn more about it.  I'm not sure what type of doctor I would like to be yet but getting a better knowledge of these types of things seems to be a good start.