Benoit Migambi Chronic and Neurological Diseases Scholarship

My introduction to the field of medicine involved a bike and a broken arm in Vietnam. As usual, my father had passed out by lunch in a drunken stupor. As a result, I fell off a bike made for adults. My parents were divorced, so I called my mother who lived 30 minutes away. In Vietnam, there were no X-rays, no analgesics; just a doctor’s tap at the fractured site, a cast, and mysterious clouds of incense blown over my arm. This incident, my firsthand experience of the “treatments” provided by an antiquated healthcare system in an impoverished nation, sparked my interest in medicine and inspired me to consider becoming a physician. For the first ten years of my life in Vietnam, I was raised by my father and my grandmother who was known for her dowager’s hump. Near the end of her life, she was bedridden with pain from deep vein thrombosis until she was gifted a makeshift wheelchair constructed from garbage scraps. In 2003, my father passed away from cirrhosis and a few years later, my grandmother followed suit due to heart failure. I felt angry knowing that my father and grandmother could not receive any treatment while I had access to world-class healthcare in America. I returned to Vietnam as an adult for the first time in 2008 after living in the US for a decade. On a trip back from the mountainous Hai Van Pass, a motorcycle crash left my cousins and me with multiple lacerations. Following the accident, my cousins handed me two pills and insisted they were a pain reliever, but a quick Google search revealed the pills were actually liver medication. Once I returned to my hotel, I applied triple antibiotic ointment from a first aid kit I had brought from America. My cousins were shocked at how rapidly my wounds had healed relative to theirs. When I realized their amazement was because they had never seen a medication work so effectively, I made sure to bring back ointment every time I visited Vietnam. After graduating from college, I received my license as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). This training proved pivotal in my personal life when one afternoon, a neighbor notified us of my grandfather suffering a stroke in the front yard. I began to assess my grandfather using previous EMT clinical practices while my mother called 911. I applied enough painful stimuli after several attempts of sternal rub to wake my grandfather. For the following ten minutes, my mother and I waited for the ambulance to arrive and transport him to the hospital. While my grandfather was unable to recall this event, this cross-section of time lives so vividly in my memory because this was when medicine especially became real and tangible to me. For the first time, I was equipped to make a difference in someone’s life through medicine. The aftermath of my grandfather’s stroke and living in the wake of my father and grandmother’s death at a young age fueled my pursuit to improve the health of others. Living in America for almost two decades has provided me with a multitude of privileges and resources (e.g. food and healthcare) that I never would have dreamt possible. Because I experienced the dichotomy of both worlds, I spent the last few years serving homeless families at the Kansas City Community Kitchen and interacting with underserved members of the community. I also taught math at Literacy Kansas City with the aim to inspire marginalized youths to pursue higher education irrespective of their circumstances. As a Neurodiagnostic Technologist, I spend time working alongside physicians in charge of critically ill patients. These individuals are often in a medically-induced coma as a result of severe seizures. Observing firsthand the depth of care that physicians take to manage patients and witnessing the drastic effect medication had on near-death patients gave me a glimpse into the impact I could make as a physician. From my youth in Hue, Vietnam to my work with marginalized families in Kansas City, I am able to walk in the shoes of impoverished individuals lacking adequate healthcare. In addition, my work as an EMT and a Neurodiagnostic Technologist provided me the skills and opportunity to work directly with patients and furthered my interest in medicine. By attending medical school, I hope to leverage my future role as a physician and the knowledge acquired therein, to improve the health of impoverished communities.