It gurgled. Or I should say she gurgled. As the newborn emerged, she pawed at the air in wonder, feeling the brush of air against her skin, the warmth of her mother’s touch. I was too shocked to even look amazed. My mind was so preoccupied with what it had just witnessed that it didn’t even bother regulating my facial expression.

I had just seen the birth of another human being.

I was at a small, private hospital where a friend’s father worked as an anesthesiologist. The patient required a C-section, and from the first cut, my attention was caught. I stood there mesmerized as the surgeon pulled back the layers of skin and fat like he was preparing a stuffed turkey.

Both my parents were surgeons in China before they brought me here. Since I was little, they had always tried to guide me towards the direction of medicine. They teased gently at first, but I gradually realized that their true desire was for me to follow their footsteps. I didn’t share their enthusiasm and told them that blood made me nauseated.

During the procedure, the nurses used gauze to soak up the dripping blood. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel queasy at all as the crimson sterilized linen piled up in a metal pan. The room had somehow sucked almost all the emotion from me, leaving only the feeling of awe at what I was witnessing.

The C-section was the culmination of an already exciting day; I had already seen a circumcision and endoscopy. When I saw the baby emerge from the womb, I realized that my parents were right: medicine is not only necessary to maintain the health of the human race; it’s also captivating.

My father told me that medicine wasn’t like working in the newspaper industry, which might go out of business. People will never cease to require medical attention so the job is extremely secure and also pays well. He was a general surgeon in China, performing gastric bypasses and similar procedures. He told me about what the organs felt like and what each did. At the time, I understood little of what he said, but still enjoyed hearing about it.

My mother was more interested in helping me understand what fascinated her about medicine. She knew she sounded cliché, yet told me that she genuinely believed helping others was the most rewarding thing she had ever done.

In China, she was an ophthalmologist, working to restore people’s vision. She told me about how vision was the primary sense and challenged me to keep my eyes closed for an hour to show me what challenges blind people faced. I always appreciated my eyes after the numerous cuts and bumps I received during that lesson.

Science has always fascinated me. From an early age, I was intrigued by science, from the oxidation reactions in chemistry to the steps of meiosis in biology or Newton’s laws in physics. Every new acquired fact and concept is another way to perceive or explain the world.

Now that I’m almost an adult, my parents won’t be able to pressure me into pursuing medicine. But they’ve done their jobs already.

I will willingly place myself into a medical career for their reasons as well as one of my own: the practice of medicine ensures that the human race lives on. The day I witnessed the birth of a baby girl was also when my passion for science fully developed, eager to learn about the world of medicine.