I was ten years old. My father suddenly woke me up during the dark, early hours of a school morning to tell me something important: I was no longer an only child; I now had a younger brother. I was overjoyed, but I noticed that my father’s facial expression did not share the same excitement. I never expected my brother to be born different from any other baby, and when my father informed me that my younger brother – my only sibling – had been diagnosed with congenital hypothyroidism, a rare thyroid disorder, I was in stunned in disbelief.
Fortunately, I learned that medications had already been developed to help alleviate the disorder and mediate his thyroid at normal levels. Despite the promising news, however, I found no reason to celebrate – at least not entirely. As I watched my brother painfully swallow a pill every day, I began to realize that my brother would have to continue this routine for the rest of his life to survive. In sense, my brother’s life was depended entirely upon a small, oval-shaped pill.
I was forever grateful and forever indebted to the medical staff that kept my younger brother breathing at the hospital and to the medical researchers who developed the medicine that keeps my brother alive today, but feelings of disappointment continued to linger. I began to ask: Why? Why with all the advancements in technology and medicine that we have today were we still not able to develop a true cure for congenital hypothyroidism – one that completely rectified the disorder instead of constantly suppressing it? And why hasn’t a cure been developed for diseases like AIDS or even cancer?
These were questions that not only genuinely puzzled me, but also angered and inspired me. It was at that moment in which I aspired to become a medical researcher dedicated to discovering new cures for diseases. It was that moment that triggered me to do the things that I do: I wanted to find new cures for diseases to provide someone else with a second chance at life, just as those doctors and medical researchers had given my brother a second chance.
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