Close to final draft. Any critiques are greatly appreciated!

[nebaker]

Also, I'm currently 157 characters over, but I'm having trouble figuring out what to omit. So, any advice concerning that would be awesome. Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

The alert bell sounds as a video call comes in from an oilrig located over 150 miles offshore. On the other end of the call, a 47-year-old male complains of generalized weakness and difficulty breathing. As the healthcare professional on the receiving end discusses the patient’s medical history in a virtual face-to-face interview, an ECG is performed by one of the patient’s trained coworkers. Instantly, the results of the ECG are available remotely, revealing significant ST-segment elevation and suggesting myocardial infarction. Within minutes, medications are dispensed and the process for bringing the patient in for additional critical care is initiated. Although this is a prime example of the type of treatment that telemedicine can offer going forward, it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is my belief that this is the future of medicine, and this is how I plan to be an integral part of that future as a physician assistant.

 

I initially began my undergraduate schooling with the intent of going on to get my Ph.D., and then moving onto a career in research working at the interface of chemistry and biology. However, in the summer of 2011, I took a job working for a professor and a post-doc in the chemistry department at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and eventually came to realize that a life in research was not for me. What originally began as a summer job ended up lasting well into the fall after the professor requested that I stay on until the completion of the project. Although there were aspects of research that I did enjoy, such as the ultimate attention to detail and the results-driven nature of the work, I felt as though the human element was completely lacking, with days at a time spent working alone in the lab, rather than interacting and feeling that I was truly able to give back to others.

 

Shortly after the research project at ULL ended, I began to strongly consider a career in medicine; an idea that had always floated around in the back of my mind. I decided to approach Dr. Joseph Pearson, the director of emergency medicine at the hospital at which I was employed as an EKG/telemetry technician, concerning the opportunity to shadow him and his fellow physicians. Dr. Pearson granted my request and after a few months of shadowing, he offered me a position working for his rapidly emerging telemedicine company, XstremeMD. Immediately upon beginning my work at XstremeMD, I began to recognize the vast possibilities that this technology could offer to the medical field going forward, especially as a means of providing care to patients in both hard-to-reach and less fortunate communities, as well as those in situations requiring rapidly diagnosed critical care. As someone who has dealt with personal struggles of my own, including substance abuse issues early in my academic career that caused me to fail an entire semester of classes, as well as the deaths of close family members in the fall of 2011, I was looking for a way in which I could make a positive impact on the lives of others in turmoil. This moment marked an epiphany in my life; for the first time I knew what my purpose was, I knew how I wanted to begin realizing that purpose, and I knew that I wanted to be the success story.

 

Once it had become clear to me that I wanted to utilize the technology of telemedicine, most importantly as a tool for treating the medically underserved, I began to consider exactly what facet of medicine would best allow me to accomplish this goal. During my time spent working and shadowing in healthcare I had witnessed first hand the ability of the physician assistant profession to integrate all of the different aspects of treatment. As I continued to observe the function of PAs compared to that of the nurses, nurse practitioners, and MDs that I interacted with, I knew that this capacity for integration, along with the ability to gain expertise over time in multiple areas of specialization, would prove to be of even greater benefit once applied to telemedicine.

 

My goals moving forward are to use the experience that I have gained working in telemedicine and the passion for care that the circumstances of my life have instilled in me, in conjunction with the essential knowledge and skills that I will acquire in PA school, in order to fulfill the potential that I know these will offer in combination. As a physician assistant, I would be fortunate enough to have the opportunity to gain expertise in a number of specializations, which would uniquely equip me to treat a spectrum of conditions and operate in a wide range of situations. From the offshore oilrig worker suffering from an MI requiring urgent care, to the child in the isolated rural community suffering from conjunctivitis, to the supplemental monitoring of high-risk ICU patients at overcrowded inner city hospitals, no treatment will be off the table. I fully understand that I will not be alone in this venture and I hope that the strong connections with like-minded individuals that I will be able to make during my time in PA school will serve to dramatically increase this remarkable potential.