Personal Narrative: My Hero :: Narrative Essay Hero Role Model

Dr. D is a cardiothoracic surgeon. He was my hero. He may well still be, even though he is a throw-back to the days when I was more concerned about science than symbolism. They say in the Chinese proverbs that "if you don't change direction you will end up where you are going." I have come to believe that this is true, and that most of the time we didn't want to go where we were headed anyway. New paths that come to fruition, "digressions" that become the assertions you are trying to make, aren't really digressions at all. They are, instead, the appearance of your "whole point" (Elbow 10). I don't know what my point is, really. Maybe I am waiting for a brilliant digression. It is a digression that brought me to this crazy craft of writing in the first place. I can tell you that Dr. D is a pioneer in the field of heart surgery. His work saw the first artificial heart from the drawing board to the operating table. I can tell you facts because I actually looked them up for a high school English paper back in the day when papers weren't about insight, but rather people and places and all those objective matters. I wrote to Dr. D and got a form letter and a whole bunch of information about his life and trials that they send to other freaks who want to be cardiothoracic surgeons at one point or another. I still have that information somewhere, tucked away with the caduceus my brother bought me when I graduated from high school and entered college as a pre-med student. They say that focusing on "x" will often lead you to discover "y,"which is exactly what happened. While I was toiling all those hours applying to pre-med programs all over the country, I was also spending an hour a day with a woman who was letting me explore the world of words. And as I spent more and more time trying to gain acceptance in a number of pre-med programs, I was making myself more of the writer that eventually abandoned science to be. I was spending all this time writing admissions letters to people telling them why it was essential for me to open up the hearts of the sick and heal them. Now I realize that the heart-sick are not always curable by a new heart or a Dacron tube.