Every year, medical trainee hopefuls submit the dreaded personal statement. Most follow a familiar formula based on advice from mentors, peers, or online guides: “Don’t stick out,” “Tell a story about a patient,” and so on. While this approach isn’t wrong, it leaves little room for the “personal” aspect—the only part of the ERAS application that truly allows insight into the individual behind the resume. Before submitting mine, I was warned it was too unusual. Agreeing that my personal life was rather unusual, I submitted anyway. It has made all the difference—being myself and giving my story a home in an otherwise prescribed application.
Artichokes
When we lived in Vietnam, my family relied heavily on our crops. Growing up in America, I often flipped through my parents’ albums to find the few photos of our towering artichoke blooms and rose bushes to remind me of what Vietnam looked like. We would have rare phone calls where my family would gather around the speakerphone to listen to my sisters still in Vietnam give a report of how our crops were doing. We were a family of artichoke farmers. That was how my parents raised 16 kids.
It wasn’t the most profitable, but it was enough to support the remaining 10 of us. My mom would often recount the various unfortunate deaths of my other siblings: the sister who died while my dad biked my laboring mom to the hospital, the brother who was rejected from the hospital because we couldn’t afford to pay, the four-year-old whose breathing worsened daily and died with his last breath at home.
“We were poor and couldn’t do any better,” my mom would say, tears filling her eyes.
Strawberries
Being poor was not specific to just Vietnam. I recall being a kid in Maine picking strawberries to later sell on a busy intersection during my days off from school and on weekends. I remember the foldable table and hand-decorated signs my siblings and I would snatch up and pack away as soon as we thought we were going to get arrested for peddling on the streets. I remember how a local news reporter interviewed us and how my sister, Chi Thu, in broken English, talked to them while I was on the lookout for any incoming cops.
“This might be a trap,” Chi Thu said to me in Vietnamese, “get ready to run.”
“I suppose those strawberries got us through school, didn’t it?” she says now as we laugh hysterically recounting these events. “We were so weird!”
Lotion
We stopped growing artichokes, and I no longer pick strawberries. It’s been years since we’ve had to make long-distance phone calls to my sisters in Vietnam. Since then, they’ve immigrated to the States, and instead of tending to artichokes, they now tend to a successful, small nail salon. Last Thanksgiving, I caught up with one of them, Chi Quy. She told me they recently caught one of their customers stealing a lotion bottle on security footage. Infuriated, I told her she had to report this to the authorities. As I was going on about the logistics of how to report this to the police, I noticed my sister just nodding along in silence.
“I prepared another bottle of lotion for her,” she said. “I think next time she comes in I will give it to her as a gift.”
I was confused. She continued:
“Her life could become so much worse if I report her, but I think perhaps doing this may help her.”
Speechless, flooded with emotion and immediately in shame, I listened. Here, I was ready to act (my assessment of the situation followed by the plan) when Chi Quy reminded me how quickly I forgot the person, the history, and my humanity. Perhaps my medical training had hardened me to the point that I failed to recognize there was a story to this lotion thief as much as there was a backstory to the little sidewalk strawberry salesman or the family of 16 who grew artichokes. I’m reminded of the cancer patient I took care of who didn’t want to hear, “We have chemo for that,” but rather, “It’ll be tough, but I’m here for you.”
In previous personal statements, I wrote about how my artichoke past encouraged me to try and solve health care accessibility and affordability; how the cunning of my strawberry youth gave me the courage to speak up to then-President Obama on rebuilding our nation’s R&D budget. I am still all those things, but I also want to be the person who just gives that bottle of lotion to someone—to be the person to reach out and connect to another human being who just needed someone to help them through whatever they’re going through.
I am mindful of my mentors who have walked their patients through their falling hair and aching bodies—those who held their patients’ hands after signing into comfort care. I am reminded that the compassion this nail technician has for her customer should be the same that an oncologist should have for his patients. I want to be the oncologist known for his clinical skills but remembered for his heart.
I wish to continue my education in a program that will support a strong, independent thinker who has had to dream of unique solutions his whole life. I wish to continue scientific research, but I also want to learn from my mentors and be inspired by things I’ve yet to discover. I am so excited to, one day, teach and train the next generation of smarter, better, more caring doctors. I hope to impart the values of my humble upbringing into my teaching; those colored by memories of artichokes and strawberries. More importantly: to remember that our hands heal not by shellac, French tips, or clearcoat—not by pill, by chemo, or stethoscope; they heal by the human touch—better that those hands be well-lotioned.
MinhTri Nguyen is a hematology-oncology physician.
