I can still smell the orange juice and vodka in the living room air, like a thick cloud over my mother’s body. The scent often greeted me when I came home from school, but I was not so used to the guttural breathing and glazed eyes that barely seemed to recognize me. “I’m sorry, baby. I need help.” My eyes darted to the orange prescription bottle on the end table, lid askew. I felt the color in my face drain as realization hit, but only for a moment before I swallowed the fear and forced myself into action.

I don’t know if I was angry. I can’t say I remember how the sadness felt. I was eighteen years old and had seen the different shades of my mother’s mental illness enough times to know I had to channel my emotions like a light switch in order to be proactive. This ability wasn’t bad, but a shadow in my mind insisted it wasn’t good. I feared it reduced my humanity, any chance of being compassionate – how can you have compassion without heavy tears or wrapping someone tightly in your arms? I was the kid who once cried for days after a baby squirrel fell from our pecan tree, yet there I was driving silently to the hospital, a few miles over the speed limit, nudging the silence every so often with “it’s going to be okay. We’ll be okay.”

Though the years since have had their bright days and dark days, the trajectory has been toward collective healing. I’ve thought back on the battles she has fought alongside my father: raising a terminally ill daughter plus three other kids; confronting colossal medical bills with a blue-collar salary; and clearly her own health. I’ve always known her as a fighter, one who could spit red fire at anyone threatening her loved ones and one who would go days without sleep just to stay by her sick daughter’s side. She is a healer in many ways, and the first to inspire me to make my future about healing others. She taught me that when someone needs you to fight for them, you be their shield and you fight for them. She taught me that compassion is not a loud and blazing feeling, but a value that glows softly like an ember and is revealed more in one’s actions than emotions. Compassion is a choice made difficult when it isn’t well-received or reciprocated, yet the beauty of it lies in that tension. I saw this complexity for this first time in a clinical context while volunteering for a year at a rural clinic in Honduras.

 “The Jungle Hospital” was aptly named, nestled in a valley between lush green mountains with thirty villages scattered around the region. Hospital staff consisted of a physician, a nurse, an accountant, and me, with an inapplicable neuroscience degree. I loved how each day was different – the fast-paced days when forty patients would be lined up by 6:30 a.m., and I would run for hours between reception, triage, the exam room, and the pharmacy. I loved the slow days too, when Dr. Martin would take time to teach me to listen for heart sounds, and how to tell if the ultrasound screen showed a male or female fetus. Machete wounds, baby deliveries, setting casts – the array of mundane to adrenaline-pumping cases led me to love medicine as an artform and challenge like no other field. The intellectual and hands-on aspects did capture my mind first, but it was developing relationships with the people behind the cases that brought depth to this vision and became my primary driver.

My Spanish was minimal at first, but Dr. Martin pushed me to communicate anyway. He taught me that a warm handshake, eye contact, and a genuine demeanor are universal enough that language and cultural differences can be just minor barriers. I still dedicated myself to advancing my Spanish quickly, and within a few months I knew patients by their personalities and the stories they would share, not just by their medical charts. The first time a patient greeted me by name – a typically unremarkable interaction – I was struck by gratitude. I had come to serve this community, yet here I felt humbled by being accepted into it. They knew I was not a doctor or nurse, yet they still saw me as part of the team they trusted with their health. It gave me a glimpse into what my future could be as a physician. Earning the trust to care for a patient’s needs is a motivation I have not experienced in any other environment.

“Health, Hope, and Healing”, the Jungle Hospital’s mission statement, applies to medicine what my mother showed me about healing and advocating for others: sometimes we fight on the patient’s behalf, but sometimes we must also offer hope, and do the fighting together. I know there will be sick children with worried parents like my own who just want to be heard – I want to be a physician that will partner with them for the sake of their child. There will be patients suffering mental illness and associable physical ailments, like my mother, who need to be treated with grace and understanding so that their bodies and minds may begin to recover. There will be patients like those in Honduras - not defined by poverty, but living with the burden of inequality, who are deserving and worthy of the highest-quality healthcare. Healing is not simple and people are not simple, yet I am confident that becoming a physician will best equip me to join the fight.