Personal Application Statement by Lindsay Kennedy Brown
In the fall of 1992, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was six years old; my younger sister was two. As a single mother with only a high school degree, my mother worked three minimum-wage jobs to meet the mortgage and keep us in a safe community. For most young children, this would have been a frightening experience. At times, it was. Fortunately, however, my mother was anything but ordinary — and neither, I suspect, was my experience with her disease.
To this day, I am impressed by her talent for making light of any situation. When her wig blew off while we were sledding, she turned it into a joke. We put makeup on the Styrofoam head upon which, each night, she set her hair. Daily trips to the hospital became grand adventures. Even when reflecting upon the end, I still laugh about certain things — which is, I am certain, the way she would want it. When her oxygen tank came, I knew she was afraid. “Oxygen tanks are for people who are really sick — I can’t be that sick,” she thought. She didn’t trust it. To reassure her, I modeled the tank through all of General Hospital and Oprah that day. “See, Mom,” I said, “It’s just air...Now you try.”
In April of my sophomore year of high school, cancer spread rapidly to her liver, bones, lungs, and brain. At fifteen, it was my job to help feed, bath, and medicate my mother. I was only able to come to terms with her deteriorating situation by seeing the beauty in it — that through taking care of her I had been granted the opportunity to return all the love she had raised me with. One day while we were sitting on the couch, Mom looked down, quite startled. She looked at me and said, “Lindsay, I’ve got...I’ve got fingers in my fingers.” After pondering what she could have meant, I smiled. “Yes Mom, we’re holding hands.”
In the weeks before her death, my sister and I welcomed hospice into our home. My life was forever enriched by the individuals I met during those weeks. One doctor came to our house to teach me a better way to keep track of my mother’s medications. Another came to monitor her throughout the night so that my sister and I could sleep. Yet another made sure she was as comfortable as possible — emptying the fluid from her lungs, helping change her, and even bringing pink nail polish so that I could paint her nails.
My mother passed away in the weeks following my sixteenth birthday. In contemplating my future, I could not help but fixate on the physicians I had met throughout my mother’s illness. Inspired, I decided to attend a university where I could immerse myself in medically related experiences, a university where I could decide whether medicine could be the right career path for me.
In the course of my exposure to medicine at Hopkins, I have discovered that the obstacles I have faced and overcome in my own life help me relate to and understand others on a much deeper level. As part of a medical tutorial, I shadowed a patient before, during, and after a breast surgery. As I introduced myself, I could sense that Penny was nervous — obviously about the surgery, but also about the fact that she had agreed to let a complete stranger observe the most intimate details of this day. The operating rooms were backed up that morning, and she and I ended up waiting and chatting for close to four hours. Her sister and mother had died from cancer, one during surgery. Agitated and crying, she told me how worried she was that she wouldn’t make it through the surgery. I held her hand and told her that I too had watched two women close to me die from cancer, my aunt and mother, and admired her bravery and decision to battle the disease.
When Penny’s operating room finally opened up, the surgical team prepped her for the operation. Just as the anesthesiologist was about to put the mask over her face, Penny pushed it away and yelled, “Wait! Lindsay! Lindsay, are you in the room?!” The surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses in the operating room froze, staring at me strangely. I took a few steps closer to Penny, who was lying naked on the table. “Dear, if you don’t mind,” she whispered, “I need to give you my phone number, so that we can chat more in your free time.”
In my time at Hopkins, I incessantly sought out exposure to both clinical and academic medicine through a variety of research experiences, volunteer work, and medical tutorials. I bring to my work the perseverance, compassion, and courage that I learned from my mother, as well as the maturity, determination, and grace that I have cultivated in myself in the time since her passing. I am emerging from my undergraduate education with a firm resolve to embark on a career in medicine, to become a source of knowledge, counsel, and strength for other individuals and families facing the triumphs and devastations of illness, as my mother’s doctors were for she, my sister, and I.
Read the students’ personal application statements:
Fasika Aberra
Shaun Patel
Ronald Romero