Daily Drama (In American TV Shows)

Chapter 1

"Experience, feel, and confront your fears so that you can heal and grow. In the end, you won't remember the bad moments in your life, only the silence that existed between the good ones. Now leave so I can talk to your mother". Those were the last words I heard from my father, accompanied by a small note he handed me, a note with the same words written on it.

I remember that everything outside his shared room in the hospital seemed very clean, as a hospital should be. It smelled like floor disinfectant, and there was a constant stream of sounds, from people talking to beeping electrocardiograms. While my parents were talking inside, nurses would come in and out of the room, likely to attend to the other people who were admitted in the same room as my father.

At that moment, I didn't pay much attention to what my father had said. He was dying from a cause no one understood, and I was angry with him because, to my immature self, it seemed like he didn't care about dying or finding out why he was dying. I was furious with the doctors because I thought they weren't trying to find the cause of my father's inability to walk due to the pain in his body. He looked so different from the memories I had of him, emaciated, thin, looking like a dead man before dying. I grabbed the note, which I had unknowingly clenched in my hands, and threw it onto one of the chairs beside me.

As time passed, I started drifting off until the next thing I remember is being in the back of a taxi, lying on my mother's lap. It was raining outside, one of the worst storms in Los Angeles that I can recall experiencing.

My mother noticed that I had woken up. Her eyes were red, tear stains on her face, and her heart was undoubtedly broken. She did what any mother would do. She looked into my eyes and forced a smile, probably trying to cheer me up. Once again, this enraged me.

My father's funeral took place a few days later. Seeing my mother crying made me cry, and together we cried for a long time until I grew tired and fell asleep again, leaving my mother alone in her mourning.

From there, everything happened very quickly. We moved from home because Mom couldn't afford the mortgage and the debts from a hospital that did nothing to solve my father's illness. She got a second job and then a third. As a child, I didn't understand the difficulties she was going through, so I didn't do anything to support her in our small apartment. I isolated myself both literally and metaphorically from the outside world. At school, I stopped talking to my friends, playing video games, and watching television. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but I made a promise to myself. I would be a better doctor than those at that hospital. I would show them how the work should be done, how lives should be saved, how they could have saved Dad.

I started studying day and night. My second home was the public library a few blocks from my school. With the little money Mom gave me for lunches, I bought second-hand books that gradually filled boxes I kept under my bed. I achieved the best grades, won awards, competed for my school against other schools, and won every time. Some small newspapers in the city wrote articles about me, but none of it mattered to me. They weren't my goal; they were just small achievements on my path to becoming the best doctor.

When the time came to go to medical school, I applied to the best schools in the country. I was accepted by all of them with full scholarships, thanks to my impressive academic records and my achievements in various competitions I participated in.

In the end, I decided on Harvard because being in Boston, on the other side of the country, would distance me from so many painful memories with my father in California.

What I didn't think about at that moment was that I would also be distancing myself from a very tired mother who was still paying off hospital debts.

"I'm so proud of you," my mother said as she hugged me goodbye outside the airport, "I know you'll be an incredible doctor who will save many lives."