( continued from page 21 )
I felt comfortable in . The days on the farm were always slow , and I never could seem to face the moments of quiet with ease . Life then was all about coming-of-age drama and existential crises . Like most 19-year-olds , my exact purpose in life seemed painfully unclear . After two weeks , I ’ d get back home and that same itch of dissatisfaction would creep up again . I was very young and very restless .
Everything changed when I turned 22 . I started medical school , and as I spent my first week dissecting the superficial back of my anatomy group ’ s cadaver , I no longer felt restless . I spent a full day shadowing in the emergency room and fell in love with the feeling of never knowing what challenges were going to present themselves next . I spent long hours in surgeries and fell even more in love with the simple glides of a closing suture and the chance of restoration that it promised the person beneath it . I fell deeply in love with all of the learning there was to do , and I had never felt more sure that I had ended up in the right place . I had always felt that ending up in medicine was inevitable . My mother and her two older siblings each walked the same halls of my medical school at one point themselves , and I grew up running in the halls between patient exam rooms . It seemed like a calling that was etched into my bones , and I felt a sense of relief when I fell in love with it so many years later . It was one thing I had been right about . However , as I once again found myself sitting around a morning fire in Pakistan , newly 23 and almost halfway to becoming a doctor , I realized how wrong I had been about so much else . threads that sit warmly against his skin . He prefers to dress only in white so that each time I slip on my lab coat , and thousands of miles stretch between us , the color of our fabric keeps us bound together .
The truth is , I love medicine . Even during the longest and most gruesome nights of studying , trying to piece together all of renal or cardiac physiology in my mind , I still love everything about it . However , while I sat near the rice fields in Pakistan this past December , enjoying the stillness in my mind without a single lecture needing to be done , I realized that if I were not a doctor , I would be a farmer . In another life , maybe one where no one in my family got on a plane to come to America , I would spend each day like my grandfather . I no longer feel a sense of fear as I acknowledge this possibility . I now feel only pride , because as he eats his same breakfast and wears his same clothes while doing the same work he ’ s always done , he is never anything less than perfectly and wonderfully happy .
This essay was a submission to the 2024 Richard Spear , MD , Memorial Essay Contest .
Lilah Kahloon is a third-year medical student at the University of Louisville School of Medicine .
I had viewed my grandfather ’ s farm as the alternate version of my life that was devoid of good fortune . I thought so much of my own father as the man who in his lifetime , went from working as a janitor in a New York doughnut shop to a respected and successful lawyer . Most of all , I had equated so much of my own personal success to the emulation of my mother ’ s career in medicine . As I finally settled into the quiet on the farm , passing the time by getting lessons from my aunt on how to knit , I started to shed all of those old layers of dissatisfaction and eagerness about what was to come . I watched my father play an old board game from his youth with his brothers and realized I had never seen him as content as he was when he got to come back to this place , to be with these people . My grandfather is a farmer . I used to believe that it was a stroke of bad luck that brought him that title . I had never once asked myself why he was so hesitant to leave his farm even for a short weekend away in the city . Now , I knew that to him there was no misfortune involved in the way his life had taken shape . The days on the farm are slow , and to him that is a blessing . He starts each morning the same , with a simple breakfast made from the crops grown outside . He carries on in his days wearing the same clothes , all composed of simple
22 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE