Undergraduate / (career in medicine) - "Evaluate a Significant Experience" Common App Essay [12]

Ello everyone,

So i'm writing my Common App essay on a significant experience, but i think it came out as way too much of a story. And opinions on this would be appreciated, and any other criticisms would be great as well. Thanks!

The nurses always talked about their patients passing. I could tell from the tone of their voices that something had happened, that they had lost somebody. It was something I was used to, hearing of people dying. Frankly, it was something I expected to hear, seeing as how the majority of the patients in the 4400 unit were over the age of eighty. But that's all it ever was, just something I heard. Just a story, and a familiar tone. It was never something I had seen. Not until that Sunday morning.

To his day, I do not know what compelled me to walk down the hall and just take a glance into the room the nurses and doctors had just rushed into. But I stopped my filing, and began walking down the hallway; I needed to see what was happening in that room, the thing that I had only heard of in passing.

What I saw was, at first, the moment I had been waiting for all of my three years of volunteering at Suburban. I was about to witness a doctor save a life. The entire situation made me feel like I was in an episode of Scrubs or House. It had all the components: doctors bursting dramatically through the doors, a patient on the verge of death, and now even the classic moment in which the doctor screams "clear" and presses the paddles of the defibrillator to the chest of the patient and sends that life-saving shockwave.

But that last crucial component was missing. I kept on waiting for a heartbeat to appear on the monitor, but it never did. Walking away from the room, I was truly shocked by what I had just seen. It was the side of medicine I had not given any thought too.

I finished up the rest of the day and went home as usual. I didn't mention it to anyone in my family. As far as they were concerned, it was just another day of filing papers and delivering water. I wouldn't have even known what to say to them, because I wasn't even sure how I was handling it.

It wasn't until later that night that it really hit me. I had watched a man die. The closest thing I had ever experienced to that outside of a TV screen was the death of my grandfather, but I was only six and had never known him. Sitting there on my bed, I was forced to seriously consider the path that I wanted to choose in life.

A career in medicine had been a dream of mine for quite some time, but up until that point it was nothing more than a naive child's dream. I had to ask myself a simple yet incredibly complicated question that night: Would dealing with death on an almost a daily basis be something that I could handle? This has been a question I have been wrestling with for a while now, but there is one thing I am absolutely certain of. The emotional pain that accompanies a failed attempt at saving someone's life is a pain I could deal with, but I would not be able to live with myself knowing that I had let the opportunity to at least try pass me by.