Who Am I Now?
Jeremy Pivor ~
On my first day of medical school, my father, a dentist, told me he’d just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Cancer had crept back into my life–except this time not into my body.
At age twelve, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an aggressive surgery, I was tumor-free for ten years. Then, at twenty-three, I received the news of an inoperable recurrence.
While going through radiation and chemotherapy, I struggled with how to move forward in the face of endless uncertainty–until I realized that, with or without cancer, everyone lives with uncertainty. Since I never knew what the next day would bring, I decided that the most important thing wasn’t where I wanted to be in ten, fifteen or twenty years but how I wanted to live now, in the present. So I applied to medical school.
Given how long it takes to become a doctor, this decision may seem absurd. For me, however, living in the present meant fostering human connection, and I felt I could do that best as a physician.
